Monit plugin for checking APT updates on Debian

It has been at least 2 years since I have been using Monit for active monitoring my VPS and I must say I think this is a really good solution for anybody that wants

• something that Just Works™
• something that doesn't use that much resources
• generally does one thing and does it well

For me Monit fits perfectly well in that criteria. And it has the ability to adapt to ones needs. I mean just look at the documentation examples!

My 'plugin'

So as I was reading the docs I found out that there possibly is no script for checking if the system is up-to-date. Having security in mind I have checked what the script from Nagios does to accomplish this task. Turns out that's just good ol' Perl script parsing the output of apt-get calls.

Then I thought - I can do that myself and maybe even add some features I need. Thus, my 'plugin' (script) for parsing apt-get emerged. It can be found on my GitHub as monit-check-debian-updates. Now that I think of it - the script should be named YAAPS or something - which stands of course for - Yet Another APT Parsing Script.

Currently you only can add a configuration that looks like this (or similar)

  check program apt path /opt/check-debian-updates.pl
    if status > 0 then alert

But in the future there should be more to it. Or not. Depends on my enthusiasm to add the missing features. I am posting in hope that someone finds this script kinda useful.