Monitor Your Application Health & Performance

If you are a system administrator, IT manager, CTO, or someone who is responsible for any IT infrastructure, and you must implement an enterprise level monitoring solution, you can always integrate one of these systems in order to have your server or application healthy and safe from crashing.

Nagios offers monitoring and alerting services for different environments. It alerts the users when things go wrong and alerts them a second time when the problem has been resolved.

With Nagios you can:

• Monitor your entire IT environment
• Spot problems before they occur
• Know immediately when problems arise
• Share availability data with stakeholders
• Detect security breaches
• Plan and budget for IT upgrades
• Reduce downtime and business losses

New Relic provides SaaS application performance management services for, PHP (Drupal, WordPress and more), Ruby, Java, and .NET. It lets you monitor applications in production, troubleshoot potential performance issues proactively, and tune app for optimal long-term performance. New Relic is used by thousands of organizations worldwide to ensure superior service delivery for their critical web apps. With its easy installation, intuitive user interface, and robust features, New Relic was designed to provide enterprise-class capabilities without enterprise-class headaches.

New Relic provides:

• Alerting
• Reporting
• Service Relations reports
• Operational Reports
• Security

Zabbix is one of the best Open Source monitoring tools for availability and performance, which can alert you whenever your environment is down, any service is stopped or crashed and reports to you everytime something fails.

Zabbix requires a database to store the monitoring data. You can choose any DB of your choice – MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQLite.

It provides:

• Control Monitoring
• Business Analytics
• Configuration Monitoring
• Security Monitoring
• App Development Monitoring

Pingdom makes it easy for you to monitor the uptime and performance of your website or server. When something breaks, because it will, you’re immediately alerted. We always double-check issues to avoid unnecessary disturbance. Once alerted you can notify your customers and dig in to see server response codes and web server output to analyze the situation.

• You can choose how often you want your site checked
• How long after it’s down that you should be notified
• How you would like to be notified.
• You can get notifications sent to an email, SMS, twitter, Pingdom app, etc.

Amazon CloudWatch is an easy-to-use web service that provides comprehenseive monitoring for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Amazon Relational Database Service(RDS) and Amazon Elastic BLock Storage (EBS). Its easy to get started with it, tere is no upfront setup in order to start the metrics.

Cloudwatch provides the data you need to make informed decisions. You specify the metric you want and receive the statistics for that metric. This allows you to build complex queries in order to access different views of the data, for periods of one-minute up to two weeks in length.

Aspects that you can monitor your Linux or Windows server:

• CPU utilization
• Disk Reads
• Disk writes
• Network In
• Network Out
• Latecy
• Server Health
• Storage
• Connections

Monit is a small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

Monit can act if an error situation should occur, eg. if apache is using too much resources Monit can stop or restart apache and send you an alert message. Monit can also monitor process characteristics, such as; how much memory or cpu cycles a process is using.

You can use Monit to monitor processes or programs running on localhost. Monit is particular useful for monitoring daemon processes, such as those started at system boot time from /etc/init/ For instance sendmail, sshd, apache and mysql and much more.

All of these monitoring systems, try to get all the essential configuration and data of your application, server, services and processes and confirm they are healthy. Administrators and staff of system get notified in order to start fixing the problems before end users get impacted by the errors. You may also want to consider incorporating an advanced alerting tool that can enhance these notifications, providing real-time alerts that enable proactive response and expedite problem resolution.

You can have more than 1 monitoring system for different things they offer e.g; Cloudwatch and Monit, Zabbix and Nagios, etc. If you want to implement any of these solutions, feel free to contact us.