Swatchdog: Intelligent Process Monitoring & Service Recovery Agent

A lightweight, user-friendly Bash automation tool designed to monitor system processes and execute self-healing workflows when critical services crash.

Built with an intelligent translation layer, it bridges the gap between human-readable application nicknames and complex background system realities (systemd unit names vs. process table binaries), making it fully accessible to junior administrators and DevOps teams alike.

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🚀 Key Features

• Autonomous Self-Healing: Detects dead processes and automatically handles systemctl state-resets, service enabling, and forced restarts.
• Intelligent Translation Layer: Uses a case-driven switchboard to map friendly names (ssh, web, database) to their exact process strings (sshd, apache2, mariadbd) and systemd tracking units automatically.
• Robust Error Handling: Validates inputs, converts variables to lowercase for safety, and implements multi-stage validation to confirm successful recovery before exiting.
• Vim-Optimized Workflow: Designed to be highly modular, portable, and testable directly via standard shell execution pipelines.

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🛠️ Monitored Environments & Architecture

The script handles the native operational quirks of major enterprise daemons automatically:

Friendly Input	Monitored Process (pgrep)	Systemd Unit (systemctl)	Target Service
ssh / sshd	sshd	ssh	Secure Shell Daemon
web / apache	apache2	apache2	Apache HTTP Server
database / mysql	mariadbd	mariadb	MariaDB / MySQL Engine

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📦 Installation & Setup

Clone the repository and assign execution permissions to your local environment:

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/aextecki/swatchdog.git

# Enter the directory
cd swatchdog

# Grant executable permission to the script
chmod +x swatchdog.sh

# Run the script by passing a supported friendly service nickname as a single command-line argument:
./swatchdog.sh <service_nickname>

# Example
# Check and recover SSH services
./swatchdog.sh ssh

# Check and recover Apache Web Server
./swatchdog.sh web

#Sample output
$ ./swatchdog.sh ssh
Checking the status of: Secure Shell (SSH)...
OK: Secure Shell (SSH) is running perfectly.

#When the services is going to restart or restored
$ ./swatchdog.sh ssh
Checking the status of: Secure Shell (SSH)...
ALERT: Secure Shell (SSH) process is dead or missing!
Initiating Intelligent Service Recovery...
-> Enabling system service (ssh)...
-> Resetting failed service counters...
-> Executing: sudo systemctl restart ssh
RECOVERY SUCCESSFUL: Secure Shell (SSH) has been safely restored online!