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.

Unleashing the power of M3 & timers

During the lifespan of M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) there has always been something lacking – timers.

M3 execution procedure was outlined in this previous article.

The execution mentioned in the latter was a one-time-execution, whereas server monitoring requires periodic invocation of monitors in order to actually provide counters over time, graphing performance.

The periodic invocation method suggested up until today was to integrate M3 with crontab.

Crontab, in a nutshell, is a Linux/Unix service for periodic invocation of executables. Implementing M3 with crontab properly meant M3 would run every X minutes, producing a Monitis counter update every X minutes, should everything run properly.

In the following article I’ll outline the changes done to support timers in M3.

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!

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.

Here at Monitis, we can’t help ourselves when it comes to improving and enhancing our products. We want our monitoring tools to constantly become more perfect than they are. That’s why we’re always posting about different or new ways to use Monitis — or adding new features.

This post is about the latest new feature we’re adding Monitis Agent Installer for Linux platforms — supported by Monitis Perl library v0.9.

A rabbit?

Writing custom monitors for Monitis is easy. On monitisexchange you can find many examples for custom monitors. However, now I bring you a surprise.

It is only rarely after I write a piece of code and represent it to others that I feel like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. On this occasion – there is something even better than a rabbit!

I’m proud to present you this time with ‘Monitis Monitor Manager‘, or M3 (M³) in short.

press release

SAN JOSÉ, CA., June 27, 2011 –  Any system administrator worth his or her salt knows that data is the oxygen of the modern age.

To keep the oxygen flowing Monitis Inc., the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one systems monitoring platform, announces that users can now monitor their MySQL-operated database servers on Monitis’s free monitoring service – Monitor.Us. The new hosted MySQL monitoring service is available immediately.

“Our new MySQL monitoring service ensures high availability of database servers and performs a host of tasks to ensure MySQL is running smoothly,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “And because MySQL is the most popular database in use today, perhaps never before can so many system administrators get so much for free.”

Did you know that you can download monitoring agents from Monitis that check the health of your servers, networks and applications — regardless of whether your firewall is up and running? In fact, these agents (which work for all operating systems) are such a convenience for so many sysadmins and website masters that Monitis has just published a new whitepaper — “Monitis Internal Monitoring Agent: Security and Performance” — to explain the workings behind the technology.

The whitepaper, which can be downloaded free from Monitis’s portal, discusses how these agents deliver the monitoring results in real-time to the Monitis Main Server, to be further displayed via Monitis’s web-based dashboard. The information — sometimes not so good, as in, a site is down — also triggers warnings and critical alerts through a whole menu of notifications, for example, email, mobile phone, SMS, IMs, Twitter and URL callback.