Create a Python Script to Monitor Website Uptime and Send Alerts

In today's digital landscape, website performance is critical for maintaining user engagement and ensuring a smooth experience. Slow or unresponsive websites can lead to decreased user satisfaction and potential revenue loss. To combat this, you can create a Python tool to monitor website performance and send alerts when issues are detected. This tool will periodically check various performance metrics like response time, uptime, and error rates, and notify you via email or other communication channels if performance falls below acceptable levels.

Key Features of the Python Tool

1. URL Monitoring: Monitor multiple websites or specific URLs to ensure they are up and running.

2. Performance Metrics: Measure key performance metrics such as response time, HTTP status codes, and uptime.

3. Alerts and Notifications: Send alerts via email or messaging services like Slack or SMS when performance issues are detected.

4. Customizable Check Intervals: Set custom intervals for checking website performance.

5. Logging and Reporting: Log performance data for historical analysis and generate performance reports.

Let's walk through how to build this tool step-by-step.

Step 1: Setting Up the Environment

First, make sure you have Python installed along with some necessary libraries:

pip install requests smtplib schedule

Step 2: Define the Monitoring Function

We'll create a function to check the performance of a website by sending HTTP requests and recording response times.

import requests
from datetime import datetime

def check_website_performance(url):
    try:
        # Send a GET request to the website
        response = requests.get(url, timeout=10)

        # Measure response time
        response_time = response.elapsed.total_seconds()

        # Check the status code
        if response.status_code == 200:
            print(f"[{datetime.now()}] {url} is up. Response time: {response_time} seconds.")
        else:
            print(f"[{datetime.now()}] {url} is down. Status code: {response.status_code}.")
            return False, response_time

        return True, response_time

    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        # Handle exceptions like connection errors, timeouts, etc.
        print(f"[{datetime.now()}] Error checking {url}: {e}")
        return False, None

Step 3: Set Up Alerts

Let's set up an email alert system that sends notifications if a website is down or slow. You can use an SMTP server to send emails. Here’s a simple example:

import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

def send_email_alert(subject, body, to_email):
    from_email = 'your-email@example.com'
    password = 'your-email-password'

    msg = MIMEText(body)
    msg['Subject'] = subject
    msg['From'] = from_email
    msg['To'] = to_email

    try:
        # Connect to the SMTP server
        with smtplib.SMTP('smtp.example.com', 587) as server:
            server.starttls()  # Upgrade the connection to a secure encrypted SSL/TLS connection
            server.login(from_email, password)
            server.sendmail(from_email, to_email, msg.as_string())
        print("Alert email sent successfully!")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Failed to send email: {e}")

Step 4: Integrate the Monitoring and Alert System

Now, we need to combine the monitoring function with the alert system to create a complete monitoring tool.

def monitor_websites(websites, threshold):
    for url in websites:
        is_up, response_time = check_website_performance(url)

        if not is_up or (response_time is not None and response_time > threshold):
            # Prepare email alert
            subject = f"Website Performance Alert: {url}"
            body = f"Website {url} is down or slow. Response time: {response_time} seconds."
            send_email_alert(subject, body, 'recipient-email@example.com')

websites_to_monitor = [
    'https://www.example.com',
    'https://www.another-example.com'
]

response_time_threshold = 2.0  # in seconds

monitor_websites(websites_to_monitor, response_time_threshold)

Step 5: Automate the Monitoring with a Scheduler

To continuously monitor the websites, we can use the schedule library to run the monitoring function at regular intervals.

import schedule
import time

# Define the monitoring schedule
schedule.every(5).minutes.do(monitor_websites, websites=websites_to_monitor, threshold=response_time_threshold)

while True:
    schedule.run_pending()
    time.sleep(1)

Step 6: Run the Python Tool

Save the script and run it in your terminal:

python website_monitor.py