In the previous article we’ve shown how easy it is to integrate popular Nagios server monitoring commands, or plugins, with Monitis M3 monitoring framework.

However, given the fact you have a working Nagios configuration, which is vast and complex – I can sympathize with your unwillingness to actually migrate to Monitis.

Monitis provides built in functionality to monitor a wide variety of system statistics as well as the ability to create custom system monitors.  Monitis Monitor Manager, or M3 for short, allows you to take these custom monitors even further by providing you with a simple framework to use the incredible power of regular expressions to pull and format literally any kind of data and automatically send it over the wire to your Monitis dashboard.

Apache and syslog-ng

While logging to a database back-end has its benefits, the setup as it stands leaves us wanting. Some applications, such as Apache, do not log via syslog-ng by default. The good news is that this can be easily remedied, and there are a couple of different ways of doing this. First, the less good way:

After the first article on syslog-ng, you should have a pretty good feel of how syslog-ng works. As you recall, the sources define what is logged, destinations determine where the logs go, and the log statements are what tells syslog-ng to create the log. However, much of the time we don’t want all of our system logs going to the same file. It can be quite useful to break up those logs in to multiple files, and to sort them by content. This is where filters come in.

Apache and MySQL make up the backbone of many Linux based web servers. According to the August 2011 Web Server Survey by Netcraft, Apache currently runs on 65.18% (or 301,771,518!) of web servers.  Similarly, MySQL is the most popular open source database and holds a significant portion of the market share – especially for web content.  This article will detail how you can get at the ‘low-hanging fruit’ in order to make some simple changes that will yield big performance gains.

Nagios, a systems monitoring software

What’s Nagios? – Nagios is a rather simplistic monitoring software. And I like simple things. Nagios’ responsibility is not necessarily to draw nice graphs for your boss or collect data you may or may not need.

Nagios simply decides whether your system runs properly. And for this question there is a very explicit answer – a YES or a NO. Nagios will alert you if the answer is a NO.

In the following article I’m going to show how easy it is to integrate Nagios with Monitis.

Tomcat. It’s more than that cute little figure above. Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. This servlet container software powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Now, we all know that the Internet is a great resource for information. But it is sometimes too much to wade through hundreds of web pages looking for tips about Tomcat performance.  So Monitis has done it for you! Below are some of the more useful tips found in various places on the Internet.

This blog is on the 12th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Thank you, sysadmins for all your hard work, long hours and sleepless nights spent on deploying and maintaining servers and other IT infrastructure.

Many of us at Monitis started as sysadmins. It is a tough task. It’s like being a Swiss Army knife – you wear many hats and do various jobs around installing, configuring, securing servers and network infrastructure, among other things. Then, you are expected to keep the infrastructure running 24×7, which sometimes means coming to the office in the middle of the night.

To help sysadmins to automate some of these tasks, we started developing monitoring tools for them. We started with an external web site monitoring service that checks the availability and the response time of your website from multiple locations. Later we added more monitoring services for servers and applications.

Unfortunately, management types often don’t fully understand and appreciate the complexity of sysadmins’ jobs. At times, it is hard to explain the need for sysadmin tools and obtain budgets for them.

To help you with this task, we are announcing a System Administrator Appreciation Day special, a 50% of all of our sysadmin tools. Use SYS50 coupon code at checkout. We will be offering this discount from Thursday at Midnight PST through the weekend.

Sign up now at http://portal.monitis.com/index.php/plans/plan-builder

We all know and love Apache.  Its great, it allows us to run websites on the Internet with minimal configuration and administration.

However, this same ease of flexibility and lack of tuning, is typically what leads Apache to becoming a memory hog.  Utilizing these easy to understand tips, you can gain a significant performance boost from Apache.