Chapter 8. Service Monitoring
Running a website without service monitoring is an exercise in flying blind. Nobody cares about monitoring when everything is going well, but as soon as something goes wrong, the additional information and warnings provided can be instrumental in quickly and correctly diagnosing the problem.
There are different types of service monitoring. Tools like Icinga and Nagios are designed to watch hosts and services, sending alerts when a service check falls outside an acceptable range. Other tools, such as Cacti and Munin, provide a graphical look at server and service information in order to give historical context to performance and usage statistics. Still other applications, such as Zabbix, aim to combine these two types of monitoring. Throughout this chapter, we’ll take a look at the various types of monitoring systems and give examples of how they can be used to ensure your site is stable and performing optimally.
The Importance of Monitoring Services
Imagine a situation where you are using an alternate cache backend for Drupal, such as Memcache—we’ll provide details on how to implement this in Chapter 16. Your cache items are now only accessible if the Memcached service is running. Imagine if the service stopped responding, unexpectedly causing your entire Drupal cache to disappear. This would force a great deal more load on your database server. Without service monitoring in place, it may take some time to figure out what the problem is; all you know for ...