Capital Hosting

It is very important that you monitor your server, and by that it is not only meant whether it is up or not, but a much more detailed view into what is going on. Popular open source monitoring tools are nagios, cacti, munin, and zabbix, and it is not uncommon to use them in combination as well.

What, now, are the stats you should be monitoring in general:

• uptime - pinging the server (provided ICMP replies are not being filtered) to check whether it is alive or not;
• disk space - monitoring all partitions on their free space. A full root partition is particularly nasty as it can bring your entire server to a stop, but it is not difficult to see that any full partition is generally a bad thing that can cause disastrous side effects;
• memory consumption - how much physical RAM is left, how much is being used by the system, by applications, etc. Is swap space in use, how often is it being used, etc.;
• CPU utilisation - how loaded is the CPU, do you have enough reserves, or are you already using the CPU near its capacity limits, how many processes are being run at the same time, etc.;
• service monitoring - are all the services on your server running as planned? Such as apache, mysqld, sshd, etc.;
• database monitoring - what is your database doing, how many queries per second are being executed, how many simultaneous connections do you have, and so on;
• network traffic - is your server generating a lot of unwanted traffic, do you have any unusual spikes, or how much traffic are you using, anyway?

These are just examples, but they give you an idea of what can be done - the actual number of checks and monitoring scripts is legion, and it will be up to you and your ISP to decide which ones to implement. It is always advisable to use monitoring, it not only means you will have your own alert system when things go wrong, but it will also give you excellent insights into the general development in terms of use and capacity of your server, allowing you to plan ahead much more accurately than without monitoring and statistics collection.

Our advice: talk to your ISP about monitoring options. Some do it for free, some will charge a bit, but being ahead of the competition and having the ability to act proactively is a big advantage for any business, especially in IT, where information is key.

Bernhard Lorenz, Managing Director @ Castlegem Ltd
London - Manchester - Vienna - Hannover - Ashburn - Fremont
207 Regent St, W1B 3HH London, United Kingdom
http://www.castlegem.co.uk

Offering dedicated sever and virtual private server hosting solutions, managed and unmanaged. Actively sponsoring CentOS and LXCenter (Kloxo, HyperVM), as well as over 70 projects enhancing sustainable development and environmental protection.