UNIX System Monitoring

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.