Generic server monitoring with Monitis & M3

Had I been told to monitor a cat chasing a mouse with Monitis, my answer would have been – “Yes, it’s probably possible”.
With the not-so-recent addition of M3 to the arsenal of monitoring tools Monitis can utilize, it is possible to monitor anything. However this alone is far from being enough. Smart implementations of proper applicative monitoring is what should be practiced.
New feature provides significantly faster insight and root cause analysis
SAN JOSE, Calif., February, 15, 2012 – Monitis, the leading cloud and web application monitoring software provider, today announces that it has added comprehensive MySQL database monitoring to its award-winning Application Performance Management & Monitoring platform. The robust Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool enables users to gain significantly faster insight when conducting root cause analysis.
The MySQL monitoring feature includes 246 monitoring variables and more than 21 different metrics to provide one of the easiest to use, yet comprehensive database monitoring tools available. It was first introduced into the free Monitor.Us platform back in June last year and has seen the code battle hardened by many hundred free users over the last 8 months.

Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework
Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one!
After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level.
Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article.
After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins.
The interface and behavior of M3 stayed exactly the same, however now it is much easier to obtain data from any source and parse the data the way you want it.
Saying that, it was time to put the new design for a test. We tried to integrate the DBI support into M3.
Guess what – it was much easier than expected!

The Internet is a great resource, but it is sometimes too much to wade through hundreds of web pages looking for tips about using Tomcat with a database. So we at Monitis have done it for you! Below are some of the more useful tips found in various places on the Internet.

The MySQL database is a crucial part of a wide variety of products, particularly web applications. Naturally, it is very important to monitor the health status of MySQL. However, there is constant disagreement on which of the many MySQL status variables provide the best overview on MySQL health status and indicate that something is not right with a server.
It certainly depends on what your application does – tuning read performance is different than optimizing write operations and everything changes when you have a cluster. The average user can use small subset of variables while advanced user want to get more detailed picture of the situation. So there cannot be one set of “magic variables” to quietly optimize every situation. However, it is possible to have a more-or-less optimal set of metrics that will allow to get a “good enough” notion about the general health status of MySQL Server.
The new white paper “Internal MySQL Database Monitoring Best Practices” discusses MySQL health, performance metrics and MySQL glitches. It can be downloaded free from the Monitis portal.