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Server Monitoring With Munin And Monit

Posted by ryuzaki0 on

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."

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Cacti by mtenhagen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How is this different from cacti?

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  2. Automatic restarts are bad by Erik+Hensema · · Score: 5, Insightful
    • A restart usually kills hanging processes, making the actual cause of the hang impossible to determine afterwards.
    • Automatic restarts make some admins lazy. Instead of debugging the problem, they accept apache/whatever service is restarted once a day.

    However, making graphs and monitoring your services is a very good thing. Graphs are invaluable in determining trends, such as memory leaks or steadily increasing load. Monitoring saves lots of downtime and unhappy customers ;-)

    Personally I use nagios for monitoring and DIY scripts for graphing. The latter mostly because I started making graphs before decent of-the-shelf software was available ;-)

    PS. what's this subject got to do with debian?

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    1. Re:Automatic restarts are bad by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Point taken, but I think an automatic restart is necessary to minimize intrusions into off-work-time with maintainaince and such. If the service hangs and there's no one there to tend to it, then it will stay hung until someone notices. This is not good if you want to keep going and not lose potential business if the site is down.

      Anyway, I'm glad I'm not a server admin. I'd like to live my private life NOT being on-call.