Monitoring Server Processes
July 30, 2007
There’s nothing worse than discovering your mail server has been down for x amount of time when you’ve been waiting for an important email. Or sshd crashing, leaving you without ssh access to your server.
The list goes on (depending on the services you run), so it’s important, if you’re running you’re own server, to have some sort of system in place to keep an eye on things for you and restart failed or out of control services so that you don’t have to worry.
There are a few monitoring applications that can accomplish this, monit for instance which quite a few people seem to like. For me, it’s a bit overkill though. I just want something simple, I don’t need all of the stats and other things it provides, I just want my services to stay running.
So I turned to god*, and no I don’t mean God in the religious sense, in this case it’s just the name for a nifty little ruby application that lets you monitor and restart services. They probably should change the name (given the amount of grief they’ve been given in google groups) but for now, it’s called god.
Installation is easy, via rubygems but the thing I like about it, is that the config files you write to monitor things are all written in ruby. (Example) You can also extend the framework with your own custom conditions allowing you to tailor it to your specific needs.
It took me a matter of minutes to setup and the ruby process running god is using around 8Mb of ram which isn’t a lot really (especially after the ram I saved switching from pro-ftpd to pure-ftpd). So if you don’t already have service monitoring setup, it’s probably worth a look (more so if you like ruby).
Feedback?
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