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monitor your backend services

28 Mar 2013

Richard Huang

I have maintained rails-bestpractices.com website for several years, not only code, but also server administration. The website is running on linode with multiple processes:

  1. nginx - http reverse proxy server
  2. puma - ruby app server
  3. mysql - database server
  4. memcached - cache server
  5. sphinx - full text search server
  6. delayed_job - background job process

As you can see, it has multiple dependencies, if one of these processes stopped, the website is down or some features disabled. It's very common that your processes are terminated, like the host is power outage or cpu / memory usage is too high. So you need a tool that can monitor your processes and restart them automatically after crashed.

Generally you have 2 choices: god and monit, both of them work well. God is a ruby gem, monit is a more generic monitoring tool, they can monitor servers, processes, send notifications if resource usage is higher than you expected, they can restart your processes if crashed, they also provide terminal and web ui to check processes status.

Here is the god status

$ god status
conferences-box-server:
  conferences-box-server.1: up
  conferences-box-server.2: up

Monit status looks more powerful

$ sudo monit status
The Monit daemon 5.0.3 uptime: 2d 18h 15m

System 'xinminlabs.com'
  status                            running
  monitoring status                 monitored
  load average                      [0.00] [0.04] [0.05]
  cpu                               0.0%us 0.0%sy 0.0%wa
  memory usage                      499136 kB [48.5%]
  data collected                    Thu Mar 28 10:12:19 2013

Process 'memcached'
  status                            running
  monitoring status                 monitored
  pid                               2246
  parent pid                        1
  uptime                            8d 18h 13m
  children                          0
  memory kilobytes                  20628
  memory kilobytes total            20628
  memory percent                    2.0%
  memory percent total              2.0%
  cpu percent                       0.0%
  cpu percent total                 0.0%
  data collected                    Thu Mar 28 10:12:19 2013

After using them, I never worried if rails-bestpractices.com is down, even after a server restart. :-)

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