Ask HN: What tools do you use to monitor your LAMP server(s)?

Nagios is probably the best free option, although configuration can be pretty complicated. I like AppFirst, it does most of the stuff you want out of the box, and you can use any Nagios plugin to add specific functionality for whatever else you want.

For alerts i am using nagios as it has all kind of checks for most services integrated. Besides services i also monitor security updates (any security upgrades available which are not installed) for debian hosts and resource shortage of openvz containers.

I am also using monit for immediate actions like restarting web server or checking some programs.

I manage both via puppet, that means I deploy a new host and the nagios configuration gets adjusted automatically with the corresponding services.

For performance data there are several tools like cacti, munin or collectd.

- Munin has iirc the problem thats it gets slowish as it polls all data from hosts then generate the carts for all hosts. Only a problem if you have many hosts...

- Collectd is a quite nice and fast monitoring solution (supports updates every second) and has advanced features like sending the data to multicast addresses. The only imho major drawback is that there comes no good webui bundled with collectd though many external uis exists.

EDIT: I forgot to mention icigna http://www.icinga.org/ a fork of nagios after some trademark problems iirc.

Monit and nagios are integrated with the ticketing system, e.g. recovery message closes automatically the corresponding ticket.

You would have to pay $11,388 per year to use Cloudkick with 60 servers and still lose all data >1 year.

I don't get the logic of paying that much for Cloudkick at all. Monitoring tends to be a couple days work (at most) to setup perfectly and then very little on-going. Hardly worth $949 every month IMHO.

We use monit combined with a number of helper bash scripts running in cron. For example, we have a cron job that does integrity checks on sqlite databases and writes to a file if it encounters corruption. Monit is set to monitor that file for size change and sends an alert if anything is written to it. That kind of thing is a bit of a hack, but seems to be the way to do it if you are using monit.

We also use pingdom for external uptime monitoring.

I use munin to monitor http://codeboff.in. The stats page is up at http://codeboff.in:8080/ if you want to take a look.

Also I use Supervisor (http://supervisord.org/) to launch all my processes and it is configured to send me an email if any of them grows beyond a memory threshold and/or crashes (in which case it also attempts to restart it a few times).