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I finally got around to setting up Stashboard for myself and I have to say I'm impressed. There were a few hurdles with the installation but that was related to Google App Engine. I'll explain a bit about the app and process.

Stashboard allows you to create a publically availible "Status board" of your services. These services can really be anything as at first glance Stashboard just allows you to edit the site manually and set if a service is up or down along with a description of what's going on. This is usefull for services that rhyme with "bitter" that go down quite often, heh.

There is also a simple to use REST interface that handles statuses so if you're an API junkie like me this will be a lot of fun to integrate in to your own applications. This is something I'm looking forward to playing with at a later date. For now I just want to see if the services I have set up are connectable or not and have the added bonus of this being done automatically. I'm the main consumer of this site so it's pointless to just update it for me.

Here's what it looks like for my sites at the moment

If I've enticed you enough to give Stashboard a try keep going. This is a general overview of what I did to get started. If you need handholding read the docs or search Google.

To start, create your free account with Google App Engine.

Create an application in App Engine for this installation. stashboard is taken so I went with nf-stashboard. You can name this anything and for the "neat url" folks like myself it can be redirected to your own domain.

For those new to Google App Engine you will need to download the Google App Engine SDK. This installs all of the files needed as well as includes the App Engine Launcher. This application is what you will use to deploy stashboard in to your app. Once it's installed, open the App Engine Launcher and add your new app. You want to use the name that was picked above as well as make a new directory for your stashboard install locally.

Now, (finally) download stashboard from http://www.stashboard.org/#download It's towards the bottom of the page. Extract it in to the folder that you specified above. This next step is very important: Open app.yaml and change the line "application: stashboard" Replace stashboard with the name of your app. Save everything, go back to the Google App Engine Launcher, hit deploy and wait a bit. Your files will be uploaded and activated in App Engine.

ALMOST THERE!

What you should have now is a fully functional version of Stashboard running on your App Engine account. It's located at http://<stashboardname>.appspot.com Click on Login at the bottom and start adding services that you want to watch.

Now this is where I experienced an issue. Services that I was adding wouldn't show up. I kept getting an error that it was an invalid service. When I checked the 'Datastore Indexes' section in Google's account manager section for my app I saw that all of the indexes said 'error' next to them. I won't go over this much but the documentation for App engine says to do this:

Source: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/queries.html#Big_Entit...

Making Stashboard more awesome

This is the part that will take the manual labor out of this whole stashboard thing. Up until now if something goes down you have to log in and mark that down. For me that's not cool. I want Stashboard to check my services and mark when something goes down for me. I ended up following the instructions on this site http://www.shockoe.com/blog/using-stashboard-for-server-monitoring/

Just be sure to find the correct slug to add to that script. This screenshot should help you find it. Make sure when you're in the Datastore Viewer that you select service as the kind of entries you want to view.

I'll be tweaking that check script later plus looking in to how to use Stashboard's REST API to keep track of services that aren't checkable through an http request.

You can view my stashboard at http://stashboard.natefanaro.com or http://nf-stashboard.appspot.com

(the custom domain isn't resolving for me in some places. going to have to check that out)