MiningMonitor is only 1BTC/month. Pete has added so many new features in the last two weeks that it is fully worth the cost. The proxy + miningmonitor has solved all of my uptime and notification issues. For example, if one of my 12 GPUs goes down (or all b/c a pool is offline) at 10am and I'm at the office and don't get home until 6pm - then it definitely makes sense to pay 1BTC/month to know about it prior to losing 8 hours of mining time. Even if I were to ssh into my home LAN (which I do anyway) to fix things, that's a whole bunch of micromanagement during the work day when I'm supposed to be doing things at work. Handling the miners should almost never happen - they should be online 24x7 and if the primary pool is down then the secondary and tertiary pool should be available. If my outgoing internet connection on the LAN goes down then that's another story - and, once I get my secondary cisco router online - the internet will automagically connect to my secondary provider.
Miners must be active 24x7!
I think you missed the point. When miningmonitor notifies you of a downed miner you still have to manually reset it. What the script does is detect the downed miner and restart it without telling out.
MiningMonitor
Miner down -> MiningMonitor notification -> You reset -> miner
Scripts
miner down -> script detects -> script resets ->miner
No middle man -> No money spent
Anyways, that's how I view it. If MiningMonitor works for your setup then by all means use it. I'm not here to make you change your setup, I'm just stating the way I see it.
Yes indeed 24x7 mining ftw!
I understand what SmartCoin does - but since I have actually spend time with both SmartCoin and BTC-mining-proxy I can say from *my* experience that the proxy accomplishes the purpose much easier and cleaner than SmartCoin. I can switch pools for all 12 GPUs in one click of a web interface with BTC Mining Proxy, where as SmartCoin I have to go and SSH into my bastion host, then ssh into the rigs, then get into the smartcoin interface, then issue a couple of commands. The proxy has a protected web interface that I can access much easier.
I'm not trying to bad mouth smartcoin - it's a valid project and I'm glad its being developed. I just don't think it works as well as the combination of miningmonitor (trending and graphs and email/sms notification) and the proxy (pool management, worker management web interface, dashboard to see all 12GPUs state in one screen).
If smartcoin works for you then that's great. It frustrated me and I didn't like the way it manages workers/pools/profiles/etc.