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Server Monitoring With Munin And Monit
hausmasta writes "In this article I will describe how to monitor your server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services."
Munin isn't at all different from Cacti, really, except that Cacti is 100% web based and perhaps a bit more mature (I use Cacti and like it a lot more than at least 4-5 other similar products out there). Cacti won't do service-testing though; maybe this is a good walkthrough for people who just want something up and running in 15 minutes (I wouldn't know, I'm not inclined to read the whole thing since a cursory glance shows there's nothing here that I don't have a running alternative for already).
The one thing that annoys me about them is that, out of the box, they don't have much configured, and to install/configure stuff, you have to jump through a lot of hoops.
In the case of cacti, it's mostly through a web-based GUI, which is OK if you have one server with one thing you want to measure, say %CPU usage, that you want to measure, but if you want to do it for a server farm or even a couple machines, it's a pain in the butt. They do have a templating system, but you still have to do a lot through the GUI. I've posted on their forums before to this effect, and they have suggestions for making changes like this en masse, but again, it doesn't work out of the box. Bottom line, the designers of cacti seem to be focused on the Web GUI, which is kinda nice for newbies, but a huge pain for people like me that like to script things.
It's the same thing with Nagios, although at least they let you change text files for the settings. Although the number (about 20) of files is reflective of how feature rich it is, it also makes it a hassle to set up. Here's an article at samag.com that illustrates the process you need to go through... imagine this for a couple hundred servers, and you can see how arduous setting up nagios could be.
So, although munin may not be as mature and well known as cacti, and monit not as popular as nagios, I think they're still worth trying out..
Add OpenNMS to the list of stuff that this duplicates or overlaps with. Not that anyone in OSS needs permission to reinvent the wheel. You've got an itch - you scratch as it pleases you.