Monitor ZoneMinder With Pingdom

[tmcglynn]

How will you know if your ZoneMinder is down? Monitor it using a third-party service! I just started doing that and wanted to share it with you.

I am monitoring my ZM with pingdom-dot-com (I'm avoiding this forum's URL filter). I am using the free service which lets you monitor one website with email alerts and includes 20 SMS alerts. If ZM stops running for any reason I will get an email, and optionally, an SMS text message. There are several reasons why ZM might stop running:

• power outage
  ISP provider outage
  cable damage
  someone turned the server off
  server crash
  etc.

Most of the configuration of Pingdom is obvious, here are notes on some details that are not so obvious:

• Check resolution: 1 minute (if someone restarts the computer, I want to know about it - set the boot loader timeout to 1 minute)
  Include index.php at the end of the URL

Under Optional Settings:

• Check for string on page: Should contain Running
  POST data: action=login&username=myname&password=mypassword

Those settings will cause Pingdom to login and verify that ZM shows "Running" on the main page. Leaving out POST data view=postlogin skips the "Logging In" page which doesn't provide any useful information about the state of ZM and makes the string test fail. Use the "Test Check" button at the bottom of the page to verify everything is correct.

The above is based on ZoneMinder Version 1.24.4. Using Pingdom will alert you if you lose your video monitoring capability. I hope you find this useful!