Chapter 8. Monitoring

A server is not very useful if it’s down. If you have skipped ahead and read Chapter 10, Fault Tolerance, you are well aware of the lengths to which some administrators go to ensure that a service stays up. No matter how much work you put into your environment, though, eventually a service or server will go down. When that happens, you want to make sure you are alerted. If it’s your job to maintain a server, it’s embarrassing if someone else has to come to you with the news that it’s down—that’s something you should be the first to know. Getting alerts is only one aspect of monitoring, though. In addition to getting alerts whenever a service goes down, you should also monitor the overall health of your environment. With the proper monitoring in place you can often see a problem before it causes an outage. Good monitoring also provides you with the health statistics you need after an outage so you can piece together what happened.

In this chapter I discuss how to set up monitoring for your network so that you will be alerted to any problems. In addition I discuss a few different monitoring tools you can use to keep track of a system’s health that even provide manager-friendly graphs of system statistics. While there are many different monitoring tools available for Ubuntu, I have picked a few that are easy to set up and use that should provide you with a good foundation for any additional monitoring you want to add.