Why I monitor my server with a Telegram Bot (and how I built it)

It’s been several years that I’m frustrated as fuck with the way I monitor my services and proxies on my main server.

To make it short :
When there is a problem, I receive an email.

And it’s just freaking shitty because I don’t have my gmail always opened and I don’t want to have notifications for every fucking email I receive.

Worst, gmail (this bitch) keep putting certain of my emails in spam randomly (certainly because they don’t come from a recognized domain), so I miss them.

And in a lot of other ways… It’s just… Crap.

And I tried a lot solutions to move away from this :

• creating custom logs on the server (but It does not tell you when stuffs break - but it can help you with the why)
• use a custom PWA with notifications on my phone (but actually the notifications services of the PWA only works when Google Chrome/Firefox is opened in background - so if you’re not a maniac on your phone you could miss it for an entire day - and it arrived several times)

And the conclusion became that I need to build my own little Android App in Java just for that… Receive Notifications.

It felt over-engineered as fuck.

And so I stayed with the email system for years.
With each time, feeling the growing anger when I missed an email telling me a service was down.

And one time, something insane happened !
One of my student shown me a little project that he did that send him a custom automatic message through its Telegram.

First : it was cool, so shout out to him !
And second : Euré-fucking-ka !

I could just send me a Telegram Message instead of a mail when something breaks.

So that’s what I did and I got to say, the Telegram API and process to create a Bot is certainly the easiest and most straight forward I used in my life.

[!note]
I tried facebook, Instagram even Discord - and they were a nightmare compared to Telegram.

So, how do you create a Telegram Bot exactly ?

Super simple !
The first thing you need to do is to create him.

To do that, you just send /start to the recipient @BotFather directly on the Telegram app.

It will gave you a <token>.
Done.

After, you just have to call the Telegram REST API through http like this :
https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/<yourCommand>

Where <yourCommand> is one of the many end points Telegram gives you.

For example to send a message :

curl -d '{"chat_id" : "the-chat-id-you-want-to-send-the-msg-to", "text": "The text of your message"}' https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/sendMessage

That’s it !

I even created a small Python API so it’s faster than using curl directly :

import socket
import requests
import time

class Bot : 
    def __init__(self, token) : 
        self.token = token.split("\n")[0]

    def route(self) : 
        return "https://api.telegram.org/bot" + self.token + "/"

    #data is in dictionnary format here - json like
    def request(self, function, data): 
        url = self.route() + function
        r = requests.post(url, json = data)
        return r.json()

Like I said, easy. as. fuck.

[!note]
The code above is open source, just copy/past it and live your best life with it.

So now, like I don’t use Telegram in my day-to-day life, I know that when I receive a Notification from it, it’s forcefully my server.

Here it is in action :

And the possibilities from this seam endless !
For now, it’s just monitoring, but we could imagine :

• Automatic stats report
• Alert on resources usage
• Alert on clients behavior
• Send command to manage the server directly through Telegram (using the / prefix in your messages)
• Even piping a LLM to it ! Why the fuck not ?? OpenClaw did it !
• And so many other stuffs…

[!note]
It works a lot it like a Discord Bot actually but is easier to set up. (I did made one Discord Bot too for managing my school, but it’s a story for another time)

So yeah…
Go create your Telegram bot now !