On his blog today Abhinav Singh has an interesting post describing how to use PHP and XMPP (the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) to get real-time notifications of the status of your servers and applications via instant messenger.

There are several open and closed source softwares in the market which can generate almost real time notifications for you. Most famous one being Nagios. In this blog post I will discuss, how to generate real time system notifications using PHP and XMPP. Specifically, I will present sample script using Jaxl (Jabber XMPP Client Library) for generating real time system load notifications, which can be received using any Instant Messengers.

The code for a class that uses and extends the Jaxl library is included. It sends the messages via Jabber after grabbing the contents of the "/proc/loadavg" file on the local system. You'll need to check out the latest Jaxl source and create a configuration file with your IM information, but that's about it. The rest is handled by the script - you can see an example here.