website-monitor

What This Skill Does

The website-monitor is a lightweight, zero-dependency Python utility designed for OpenClaw AI agents to perform robust website health checks. Unlike bloated monitoring tools, it relies exclusively on Python's built-in standard library (urllib), ensuring high reliability and zero supply-chain risk. This skill excels at verifying availability by checking HTTP status codes, measuring latency in milliseconds, detecting content drift via SHA-256 hashing, and validating specific content presence. It outputs clean, machine-readable JSON data, making it ideal for automated monitoring workflows, cron jobs, and custom alerting systems.

Installation

To install this skill, use the ClawHub CLI tool integrated with your OpenClaw environment:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/claudiodrusus/website-monitor

Ensure that your environment has Python 3.x installed, as the tool relies on standard library components for all networking operations.

Use Cases

• Service Uptime Monitoring: Automate health checks for critical internal services or external APIs, triggering alerts if response codes deviate from the expected 200 OK.
• Content Change Detection: Monitor static pages for unauthorized changes by comparing current page hashes against a known-good baseline hash.
• Deployment Verification: Confirm that a web application deployment was successful by verifying specific text strings (e.g., 'v1.2.0') appear on the landing page.
• Performance Benchmarking: Track response times over time to identify sudden latency spikes that could impact user experience.
• Infrastructure Alerting: Chain the skill with system commands to send notifications via email or Slack whenever a site failure is detected.

Example Prompts

• "Monitor https://api.myservice.com every 5 minutes, ensure it returns a 200 status, and alert me if the hash changes from fb91d75a6bb43078."
• "Check the status of our marketing site and production dashboard; output the results as a JSON list so I can parse the latency stats."
• "Verify that our homepage contains the string 'Welcome to the portal' and let me know if it fails or returns any status other than 200."

Tips & Limitations

• Tips: Use the --json flag when chaining with other OpenClaw tools to ensure seamless data ingestion. If you are monitoring high-traffic sites, remember that the tool is synchronous; consider running multiple instances or orchestrating checks if you need sub-second concurrency across hundreds of URLs.
• Limitations: Since it is a lightweight tool using urllib, it does not execute JavaScript. It will only see the initial raw HTML response. This means it is perfect for server-side rendered pages or simple API endpoints, but it will not accurately reflect content generated by client-side frameworks like React or Vue unless they have a server-side rendering layer.