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 …

1. Apache and MySQL Logging with Syslog-ng
This article shows how to use the popular system logging tool Syslog-ng to log Apache and MySQL events. Apache does not log via syslog-ng by default so we go over two methods of easily remedying this. We also show how to use SQL queries to view syslog-ng data.

2. Using M3 to take System Monitors to the Next Level
Monitis provides built in functionality to monitor a wide variety of system statistics as well as the ability to create custom system monitors. Monitis Monitor Manager, or M3 for short, allows you to take these custom monitors …

Apache and syslog-ng

While logging to a database back-end has its benefits, the setup as it stands leaves us wanting. Some applications, such as Apache, do not log via syslog-ng by default. The good news is that this can be easily remedied, and there are a couple of different ways of doing this. First, the less good way:

Method #1: Changing the Apache configuration file.

First, we need to setup syslog-ng appropriately by creating a new source for apache, such as the following:

source s_apache {
 unix-stream("/var/log/apache2/apache_log.socket"
 max-connections(512)
 keep-alive(yes));
 };

log { source(s_apache); destination(d_pgsql); };

This recycles the original destination for …

The MySQL database is a crucial part of a wide variety of products, particularly web applications. Naturally, it is very important to monitor the health status of MySQL.  However, there is constant disagreement on which of the many MySQL status variables provide the best overview on MySQL health status and indicate that something is not right with a server.

It certainly depends on what your application does – tuning read performance is different than optimizing write operations and everything changes when you have a cluster. The average user can use small subset of variables while advanced user want to get more detailed picture of the situation. So there cannot be one set of “magic variables” to quietly optimize every situation. However, it is possible to have a more-or-less optimal set of metrics that will allow to get a “good enough” notion about the general health status of MySQL Server.

The new white paper “ …

I hope everyone is enjoying summertime, at least in the northern hemisphere. I’m about to head out to the pool, but before I go, here is a summary of this week’s blog posts.

1. Introduction to Perl interface for Monitis API
Monitis announces a simple way to access its API through Perl, a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. This post demonstrates some examples for using the API with Perl and describes some of the benefits of the programming language. The source can be found on our Github page.

2. 101 Tips to MySQL Tuning and Optimization …

We make a lot of posts that give IT tips and advice, as well as recommendations on how to use Monitis, so here is a summary of the posts for this week in case you missed them.

Monitoring IIS With VBScript via Monitis; It’s so Easy!

This post demonstrates how to monitor an IIS using Monitis Custom Monitors and VBscript. You can use the Monitis API to monitor your own custom metrics. This is very powerful because it lets you monitor any IIS metrics you like, set thresholds and receive notifications.

Top 4 Software Based IIS Server Performance Tips

These 4 …