BoT is a network/server monitoring tool, written entirely in Perl.

I started writing BoT as a proof of concept that I could monitor the networks as well as the commercial packages that were available at the time. It was monitoring some essential services, until one day I got a page from BoT saying a service was down, but the commercial product failed to notify us. Upon checking the GUI of the commercial product, we found that it considered the service still working and available, although BoT had detected it correctly and immediately.

Over the years, BoT grew to include any service that we needed watched and notified upon.

BoT was named because it needed a name that was easier to say than "That Perl script that checks the servers and pages us. The capitalization has no real significance, other than it identifies it from anything else which may be called "Bot".

BoT consists of only 3 scripts required by the main script, and a couple helper scripts to keep things running smoothly. He is intended to run once a minute, which has been very successful, even with monitoring several hundred services from a low end monitoring server.

BoT keeps it's configuration in flat files, and it's statistical information in DBM files, using AnyDBM_File. It is written to handle being called multiple times, once for each monitoring list, and will do collision avoidance, to keep the same test from running more than once.

As much code as possible was written into BoT's scripts, rather than depending on 3rd party Perl modules to be installed, for ease of migration to other servers. He has been migrated a lot over the years, which is generally a matter of copying his directory to another Linux machine, running him to ensure the Perl modules are all in place, and then removing him from the old server's cron.

Notification is sent via email to a list configured for each monitored service. Of course, the list may be shared among multiple services.