At $WORK we typically use Redhat Cluster to make MySQL highly available. We have a number of 2-node clusters (active/passive) and it works nicely, for the most part. One thing I find very annoying is RHCS has no notification framework to notify you when a service is relocated to another node (because of failure or otherwise.)
In a perfect world, the only reason MySQL would pass between nodes is for server maintenance, under the control of a human. In reality, crap happens. Redhat Cluster manages all this, but I still want to know that a failover happened (is hardware going bad? did a software bug cause a failure? etc.)
Most monitoring tools weren’t designed to report on a clustered service. I can add a check that connects to MySQL using the cluster-managed IP - but that only tells me if MySQL has failed completely. The failover between nodes generally takes under a minute so it’s easy for that type of monitoring check to miss a …
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