What tools do you use to monitor a web server?

Question

What tools do you use to monitor a Ubuntu web server? More specifically, I'd like to monitor server uptime, resource usage (RAM, CPU, bandwidth, etc.), Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Answer 1

Nagios is my favorite tool for monitoring. It can monitor web servers,services,hosts and so on. It is highly customizable and there are lot plugins available for various purpose.

Some features of nagios:

• Monitor network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
• Monitor host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)
• Allow for simple plugin design
• Do parallelized service checks
• Define a network host hierarchy using
• Contact administrators when service or host problems occur
• Define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
• Automated log file rotation
• Support the implementation of redundant monitoring hosts
• Offer an optional web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc

Here is an online demo: http://nagioscore.demos.nagios.com/

Answer 2

munin and its plugins are all you need. You'' want to search Synaptic (or aptitude) for them.

It checks resources (like the others do) but unlike them, it's completely non-interactive. It writes out a batch of HTML files and graphs each time it updates. You can automatically zip these up and email them to you (the script would have to be your work - would be simple) or you can make them available through apache (just bind a virtualhost's root to /var/www/munin/).

The huge advantage over other (interactive) avenues is it's not a security risk. Running Webmin (as one example) means there's another attack vector into your system. And it being a fairly popular application means it's well targeted by people that script-hack servers.

It might be a bit "tinfoil hat" but security really is much easier to work with when you've only got a couple of vectors to cover.

Answer 3

For a live view i would login using ssh and then run htop (for cpu, mem) and nload for network load.

both htop and nload are available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Answer 4

If you need something that scales (in other words, you may end up monitoring multiple webservers, dns servers, etc), then I recommend Cacti.

It has steeper-than-most learning curve, but I've used it in the past to collect 800+ statistics every minute from various sources. The collection process, since it's threaded, completes in about 40 seconds.

It uses RRDtool to graph the sources. It's web based and it's in the repositories.

Answer 5

If you need a quick and simple information, ubuntu has a tool called landscape-sysinfo

This will print out: system load, hard-disk usage, memory usage, no of processes, and ip addresses of you box

Just enter in your console: $ landscape-info

Answer 6

I like to use a package that most people will probably use called Webmin

It's a web based program that allows you to monitor almost any server stats, it allows you to change power options (like shutdown, restart). You can add users, start/stop services and almost anything you would need to do for a server. I recommend you give it a try!

Here is a good tutorial to install it

It says Jaunty, but should work with any version of Ubuntu :)

Webmin is considered highly insecure, however.