UNIX System Monitoring

Pleth.  I get the impression from Matt’s post that he likes the software pretty well, I know he’s not a big fan of any kind of bloated software.

I checked Monit’s website this morning and was very impressed to see that they also have a free iPhone application that will allow you to track your systems from your phone.  How cool is that?    The software itself is also pretty cool. Monit can start a process, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses too much resources.

Being a developer, one thing that I can see might be useful is that Monit also allows you to monitor files, directories and filesystems for changes, such as timestamp changes, checksum changes or size changes. There are several other solutions out there that will all you to track remote hosts also but they don’t have all of the functionality that monit has I don’t think. With Monit you can monitor remote hosts; and ping a remote host and can check TCP/IP port connections and server protocols.

I can remember a few years back I installed a similar solution to this on one our first servers for the purpose of tracking uptime and posting it on our website, it was a nice solution but it had so many security revisions with it that we eventually decided the risk wasn’t worth it in the long run.  I can’t remember the name of the software we were using but I am sure it’s gone away by now…  Here’s what Matt had to say about Monit on his blog:

When you maintain several servers each running several virtual machines and have anything else at all to do, it is impossible to keep your eyes on them 100% of the time. There are a handful of software packages out there that can do this for you, but most are either too bulky, too complicated, or lack the features that you want.

Scott Pinkston referred me to one the other day called Monit, which is the first one of these programs that I actually liked. Most of the others just have too much. This one is short, and to the point. Monit installs very quickly, and runs in the background as a daemon.

One very simple config file holds the configuration data for the services you want to monitor, and if you so choose, you can have a secure webpage display stats on your services. It can also be configured to email you (or call the beeper, etc…) if certain events occur, and best of all, is super lightweight. It won’t tell you if your version of apache needs updated and it won’t impress you with tons of buttons, whistles, and flash animations. But it will let you know if some process is running away, and it will kill it for you (and restart it if you have it configured)

So far, we have NO complaints. It’s licensed under the GPL, and they also sell a version (which we haven’t tried) that can monitor multiple servers from one central login for around $135.

Here’s a screenshot of Monit that I found on their website, looks pretty straightforward to me…

UNIX System Monitoring | www.mcritch.com