As I stated in my earlier post, I have two WAN connections and of course, there’s a need to monitor them. The monitoring logic is pretty simple, it will send me a message on Telegram every time there’s a state change – UP or DOWN.

Initially this monitoring logic was built as OpenWrt hotplug script which used to trigger on interface UP / DOWN events as described in this article. But then I got a mini PC box and it runs Ubuntu and a pfsense virtual machine. While I could build the same logic by discovering hooks in the pfsense code, but it’s too complex and moreover it doesn’t really make sense to monitor the connection of a device using the same connections!

Perfect, time for a new small project. I was trying to learn Go language, what can be a better way to learn a new programming language other than solving a problem? I build my solution using Google Appengine in Go.

Why AppEngine? Well, yes I could use any random monitoring service out there but I doubt any such service exists which sends alerts on Telegram. Also, AppEngine is included in the Google Cloud Free Tier. So it makes a lot of sense here. My monitoring program runs off Google’s epic infrastructure and I don’t have to pay anything for it!

If you’ve looked at Go examples, it’s pretty easy to spin up a web server. AppEngine makes running your own Go based app even easier, though with a bit of restrictions which is documented nicely by Google in their docs. The restrictions are mostly about outgoing connections and file modifications. While I don’t need to read/write any files, but I need to make outgoing connections, for which I used the required libraries.

AppEngine app always consists of a file app.yaml which describes the runtime, and url endpoints. So here’s mine:

Now the main code which will handle the requests:

I separated the code into two packages to keep it clean, so here’s the ispinfo package:

Since the connection status needs to be monitored periodically define a cron job for it, in cron.yaml:

gcloud app deploy app.yaml cron.yaml  in the directory and the app is ready!

This is a small monitoring service that managed to build in a couple of hours while learning Go language and the AppEngine API. It should take hardly an hour for a pro. Also I didn’t really follow the correct packaging principles – the ispinfo package exposes pretty much all fields. This could have been better.

The code is available in my github repository in case you’re interested in it.

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