On a day-to-day basis my primary focus is on development, but since Pleth, LLC is a hosting company as well, I have lots of opportunities to be exposed to server management techniques and technologies. One of the more impressive tools we have been working with over the past 7-8 months is Monit.
Monit is a free open source utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and filesystems on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations… Monit can start a process if it does not run, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses too much resources. You can use Monit to monitor files, directories and filesystems for changes, such as timestamp changes, checksum changes or size changes. You can also monitor remote hosts; Monit can ping a remote host and can check TCP/IP port connections and server protocols. Monit is controlled via an easy to use control file based on a free-format, token-oriented syntax. Monit logs to syslog or to its own log file and notifies you about error conditions and recovery status via customizable alert.
Matt “Critch” Critcher’s post, UNIX System Monitoring, from last September was written as we were just becoming familiar with Monit and had installed it on one of our more lightly trafficked servers for a testing phase.
Well, after more than a half of year of use I can say that we have been pleased enough with Monit that we have decided to install it in all of our shared environments. As Critch related, Monit is lightweight and uncomplicated to use. It simply runs in the background as a daemon. If server monitoring and management is on your plate, I would definitely recommend taking a look at it.
