Server Monitoring on Justin Carmony

Tracking Your Data with StatsD, Graphite, and Graphene

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 05:04:23 +0000

Update: So I spelt ~~Neil~~ Neal’s name wrong. Sorry Neal! I also added some other links to the bottom that he mentioned to me.

Its been a little over 48 hours, and StatsD, Graphite, and Graphene have already paid off major dividends. While speaking at Tek12, Neal Anders was giving a talk on Graphite which I wanted to attend, but I was speaking at the same time I was speaking on Redis so I couldn’t. Then, a week or so after the conference, someone posted a link about StatsD on twitter (I can’t remember who), so I started poking around, loved what I saw, and within an hour I had it running on a server for Dating DNA friday night (I still do some contract work for them to help keep their infrastructure running well). I quickly added about a dozen metrics to track, and went to bed.

Sending Email from non-email Ubuntu Server

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:22:11 +0000

I have a couple of scripts that use the linux “mail” command to send results of cron jobs, backups, and such. The problem is I don’t want to setup more overhead than I need, nor do I want to setup non-secure services. So after asking the guys on the #uphpu channel, they recommended postfix. So for a Ubuntu 10.04 server, just run the following commands:

aptitude install postfix #when prompted, select Internet Site aptitude install mailutils

Server Monitoring with Wormly

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:06:57 +0000

I know I’ve been behind in my posts, so I quickly wanted to catch up with a few I’ve been meaning to post. The first is my recommendation for a service called Wormly. Now, I’ve tried to run my own Nagios servers and such, and they work, but here is why I like Wormly.

First, is simple and easy to use. The interface is great, and covers all the basics.
Second, downtime and server health monitoring in one package. I’ve always thought these two should go together, but it wasn’t that easy to do on my own with the tools I had. With Wormly, its super easy to set up. You just install a small one-file PHP script.
Third, its cost effective. If you are monitoring hundreds of servers, you would probably want to roll your own to integrate it with your own deployment systems. However, if you have just a handful, or even just a few dozen, it is very cost effective.

The bottom line is there is no reason not to have a server monitoring tool in place, and Wormly has been a great tool. We’ve used it to monitor Dating DNA’s and Clipish’s servers for several months, and it is worth every penny. I highly recommend it.