README.md

databasemonitor

We have lots of databases that are periodically populated. This script notifies us if a database has not seen updates in an expected amount of time.

To run:

1. Setup a virtual environment:

   python -m venv .venv
   

2. Activate your virtual environment

   .venv\Scripts\Activate (Windows)

   .venv/Scripts/activate.sh (Linux)

3. Install all dependencies

   python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
   

   Also, install databasemonitor

   python setup.py install 
   

4. Adjust the main.py script to refer to the databases you want to monitor. The config variable is a list of dictionaries with the following values:

     table_name - name of the table to check
     date_col - datetime column to use as the critera
     email - email address to notify if it fails the check
     notification_secs - number of seconds of tolerance, outside of which will notify the email address
   

For example:

[
    {
        'table_name': 'tabletomonitor', 
        'date_col': 'date_time',
        'email': 'brian.seel@baltimorecity.gov', 
        'notification_min': 60
    },
    ...  # repeat as necessary
]

4. Run the script

   python main.py --email_address <user> --email_password <pass> --smtp_server <server>
   

   Where <user> is the username to the email account to use to send notifications. <pass> should be the password to that account. <server> is the SMTP server address used to send notifications, which has the user/pass credentials.

This is designed to work with a scheduled task or cron job to regularly check for database updates.

Testing

To run the test suite, run:

python -m tox -e py39 -- --email_username bcdotnotifications@gmail.com --email_password eV^5d97% --smtp_server smtp.gmail.com --pop_server pop.gmail.com

The same username/password is used for the SMTP server (to send email) and for the POP server (to check the email was received)