Readme

README.md

@@ -1,3 +1,28 @@
 # minitor
 
-A minimal monitoring system
+A minimal monitoring system
+
+## What does it do?
+
+Minitor accepts a YAML configuration file with a set of commands to run and a set of alerts to execute when those commands fail. It is designed to be as simple as possible and relies on other command line tools to do checks and issue alerts.
+
+## But why?
+
+I'm running a few small services and found Sensu, Consul, Nagios, etc. to all be far too complicated for my usecase.
+
+## So how do I use it?
+
+### Running
+
+Eventually it will be installed as python package, but for now:
+
+```
+make run
+```
+
+It will read the contents of `config.yml` and begin its loop. You could also run it directly and provide a new config file via the `--config` argument.
+
+### Configuring
+
+In this repo, you can explore the `sample-config.yml` file for an example, but the general structure is as follows. It should be noted that environment variable interpolation happens on load of the YAML file. Also, when alerts are executed, they will be passed through Python's format function with arguments for some attributes of the Monitor. Currently this is limited to `{monitor_name}`.
+