Create VM to run monitoring software for anti-censorship team
So far, the anti-censorship team's infrastructure is monitored by a sysmon instance that gman999 generously runs for us. Every five minutes, sysmon establishes TCP connections to a number of machines and if any of these checks fails twice, we get an email alert.
The problem is that we cannot directly edit its configuration file, so we email gman999 whenever it needs an update. I would like to avoid this friction. Besides, sysmon is very simple and cannot handle, say, HTTP redirects.
I think it would be best for the anti-censorship team to run its own monitoring service, on a dedicated VM. We can then add monitoring targets ourselves and don't need to block on others.
I have been experimenting with a service called monit. It's free software and lightweight, yet flexible enough to fulfill our needs. I think it would be helpful to run monit on a dedicated VM. Does this make sense?