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."

Comments

But can I run this on Windows?

[Steve_Jobs_HNIC]

.... been waiting a while to say that.

Automatic restarts are bad

[Erik Hensema]

• 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?