💥 No More Silent Server Restarts: My Lightweight Python Notifier
🔍 The Problem
Servers would restart. Services would silently fail.
And nobody would know until users started complaining.
I built this while working at VectorFlow, where physical access systems ran on Linux servers that occasionally restarted without warning — and downtime meant real-world security delays.
Logs were too noisy. Traditional monitoring tools missed it.
We needed a way to know — the second a server came back up.
🛠️ The Fix: 10 Lines of Python + a Cron Job
I built a lightweight script that:
- ✅ Runs at boot via crontab (`@reboot`)
- ✅ Captures server hostname, timestamp, and uptime
- ✅ Sends an email alert with restart details
- ✅ Logs every restart in a local file (for postmortems)
It’s tiny. It’s fast. And it just works.
📬 GitHub Link
You can grab the open-source version here:
👉
github.com/chinmaya-chhatre/server-restart-notifier
📈 What Changed
- ⏱️ Time-to-detect server restarts dropped to < 1 min
- 📧 Instant alerts helped correlate uptime with other logs
- 💡 Reduced false positives and alert fatigue by keeping it simple
⚖️ Tradeoffs I Made
- Simple Over Smart: No agent, no daemon, no bloat — just Python + crontab
- Email Over Slack: Chose email to avoid adding webhook dependencies (but extensible)
- No External Monitoring: Works offline and boots with the system — self-contained by design
🧠 What I'd Add Next
- 🟢 Add a webhook to integrate with Slack or Discord
- 📊 Forward logs to ELK or CloudWatch for central visibility
- 🔒 Add signature hash to verify alert authenticity (optional)
🧵 Why I’m Sharing This
Because not every solution needs a $99/month SaaS tool.
Because every SRE has lost time to “mystery restarts.”
And because sometimes, a 10-line script can prevent a production fire.
📎 Bonus Links