Monitor all the Things (with monit)!
System administrators have a *ton* of different monitoring solutions to choose from. Many of these (Nagios) are forced on them by evil forces who happen to be higher up in the corporate food chain. Some, however, are a joy to use. In this tutorial, I’ll teach you how to use one of my favorites: Monit ( https://mmonit.com/monit/ ). Monit can help you monitor all the same things as the others (CPU and disk usage, etc.), but it also
- intelligently checks your services to make sure they’re up and responding properly,
- can react when things go wrong (restarting services, running scripts, etc.),
- has cool extra features like service management and file-hash checking (to make sure the bad guys haven’t tampered with your system binaries, for example), and
- is really easy to use.
In this post, I’ll take you from “no idea what’s happening on the server” to “closely monitoring critical services.” Follow along!