Requirements — System Health Monitor

Before starting this project, make sure you are comfortable with the topics below. Each links back to the relevant course section.

Knowledge Prerequisites

Topic	Course section	Why you need it
Variables & arithmetic	day03-part1-variables-quoting	Storing and comparing metric values
Control flow (if)	day04-part1-control-flow	Threshold comparisons
Functions	day01-part1-functions	Modular metric collectors
Error handling & trap	day02-part1-error-handling	Graceful failures and cleanup
I/O & pipes	day05-part1-io-pipes	Capturing command output
cron	day04-part1-automation-tools	Scheduling unattended runs
curl (optional)	day04-part2-networking-apis	Sending Slack/webhook alerts

Tool Prerequisites

All tools below come pre-installed on any standard Linux system:

# Verify before starting
bash --version        # need 4.0+
uptime --version      # part of procps
free --version        # part of procps
df --version          # part of coreutils
awk --version         # part of gawk or mawk

For the optional Slack alerting step:

curl --version        # need 7.x+

Estimated Time

Mode	Time
Core script only	2–3 hours
With config file and logging	3–4 hours
With Slack alerts and cron	4–5 hours
Full solution with all enhancements	6–8 hours

What You Will Produce

A single executable script health_check.sh plus: - health_check.conf — user-configurable thresholds - A cron entry that runs the check every 5 minutes - A logfile at /var/log/health_check.log (or ~/logs/health_check.log)

Related Project

This project forms the foundation of the Capstone Project in day05-part1-capstone.

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overview | setup