March 11th, 2010 → 10:15 pm @ Stuart // No Comments
Anybody who host web sites and applications for clients knows how important it is to make sure that you have the ability to monitor the health and availability of your servers – even when you’re not at your desk.
In reality, there are many tools to do this, and quite a few are free. I’ve set up Nagios in the past as it’s extremely comprehensive, but it’s also a bit of a nightmare to get your head around and takes a lot of time to get working in the way you want.
For the past six months or so, I’ve been using a fairly new server monitoring tool, Server Density, to handle my monitoring for me. And it excels at the task.
Install takes less than five minutes via a well documentated python script, and once that’s done and your basic config is in place, off it goes. Within minutes you can view the status of your server via the many on-screen charts and grids they have. You can choose to monitor CPU load, memory, processes, disk usage, network traffic, Apache and MySQL, and set custom alert thresholds against each. Then you choose to receive the alerts via email, text or even iPhone push. I use both the email and iPhone options to ensure I’m kept up-to-date. They even have a free iPhone application for you to view your server status on the go.
Over time, the tool will start to learn about your server to get a feel for it’s normal load levels. Once it’s done this it shows you clearly anything that falls outside of those levels via ‘anomaly’ tracking.
Boxed Ice, the company behind Server Density, are a relatively new outfit, set up by David Mytton who’s currently still at university(!). They were one of the winners of Seedcamp 2009, an investment program that sees 5 start-ups receiving investment.David posted a great article on the Boxed Ice blog about his experiences with this, which is well worth a read.
Since I’ve had Server Density installed, I no longer wonder whether I’m going to know how my servers are performing. And for the measly price of £7 per month it really is a no-brainer. A great tool and supporting start-ups? It gets my vote!