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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."
Egads! My education is useful!
= English&site=courses&course=ss06vl02
We're discussing such issues in a class I'm taking on software fault tolerance. In discussing selective restarts and backup processes Apache is frequently cited as an example of how software should fail gracefully, consistently, and then handle that failure itself. The lecture slides can be found here: http://wwwse.inf.tu-dresden.de/index.php?language
Apache has some memory leaks in it. It is not bad, it happens, especially in a piece of software like that which is expected to run constantly and NEVER fail. So what the Apache software does is every so often, or when it detects that its memory usage is getting out of hand, it fires up a second copy of itself and then kills itself letting the new not-yet-leaky copy take over.
So to you (IT/admin) that daemon may run forever, but thats because my people (CS/developer) did our jobs (for once) and ensured that the application cleaned up its own messes.
because in software-land, "mature" is rapidly followed by "obsolete." I love Nagios, but I'm hesistant to recommend it to anyone who's not comfortable spending a week on building and configuring software.
Packages for it are often broken or from the old 1.3 tree, which makes for confusion when following examples that use 2.0 syntax.
Configuration is extremely challenging to start from scratch with, especially if you want to do anything custom.
There are a number of external dependencies, particularly if you want to compile the plugins.
That said, Nagios still whips the pants off quite a few commercial monitoring products I've evaluated.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll