Enable sysstat and install one of the sysstat graphing tools (or roll your own with your preferred scripting tool).
Noting when things go titsup.com can be particularly useful.
Linux server monitoring tools
41–50 of 83 posts
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#42If you have multiple nodes, I recommend new relic. It's a bit pricey, but if an issue arises in your stack, new relic can help you immediately pinpoint where and what the issue is. ps. I can view new relic on my phone, so if I get a pagerduty, I can still see what's up if I'm at the beach.
I'll also support New Relic.
If you're just starting out, the free tier is pretty good.
What the monitoring tools lack on specificity (and depending on your stack, it may provide varying levels of awesome -- server monitoring is weak but improving), it has massive win on zero-configuration installation.
Just sign up, instrument, and start monitoring.
If you find bits lacking, there are almost always local tools you can use to supplement.
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#43If you have multiple nodes, I recommend new relic. It's a bit pricey, but if an issue arises in your stack, new relic can help you immediately pinpoint where and what the issue is. ps. I can view new relic on my phone, so if I get a pagerduty, I can still see what's up if I'm at the beach.
New Relic is great for application monitoring, but the systems monitoring is kind of meh. And I've been getting way too may false positives on the systems alerts. If you only want systems monitoring and not deep application performance insight, New Relic is way too pricey and not really that good.
Sounds like Munin would suffice for you. Also, it's free.
munin-monitoring.org
> not really that good
New relic has such rich functionality that it is easy to overlook some of its utility. It took us a while to get it tuned to our needs, but now that we have it configured, I couldn't imagine running a high availabilty web service with anything else. Suppose I get a pagerduty for high memory usage on a server. I would then go look at that server in new relic, see what processes are using the memory, see what the memory usage for that process has been like for the last 6 months, perhaps notice a slow steady increase in memory consumption, realize there's a memory leak, etc.
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#44One of 7 Buzzfeed-headline-style pages for system administrators you won't believe!
Seriously, glances is nice, but I generally use tmux with a bunch of panels, showing stuff like `watch -c df -h +nr`
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#45Is there a tool that would allow collecting historical data on memory and CPU usage patterns of individual processes? In troubleshooting you are frequently dealing with the situation that some process is "exploding" in memory or/and CPU usage and either you are not there at the moment to run htop or you might not even be able to easily log in on the server to do checks.
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#46sysstat (sar), slabtop, free
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#47iftop is also a very good one, gives nice graphs of the network utilisation sorted by host or port— http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/iftop/
Check out bwm-ng
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#48Actually, bwm-ng is a nicer alternative to iftop. more information an nicer presented (I think)! try it :)
bwm-ng really has a neat and to the point interface, but it doesn't gives break up of individual established network sessions. Some times the individual details are needed too. That's where iftop comes in handy.
Yeap. bwm-ng > iftop for most uses. If there's a performance problem, iperf is the old standby and even works with 10gbe links.
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#49Is there a tool that would allow collecting historical data on memory and CPU usage patterns of individual processes? In troubleshooting you are frequently dealing with the situation that some process is "exploding" in memory or/and CPU usage and either you are not there at the moment to run htop or you might not even be able to easily log in on the server to do checks.
"atop" can do it to some degree. When you run atop interactively, it uses the process accounting facility to find out not what is running exactly when it takes a snapshot of the system, but also what processes started and exited since the last refresh interval.
Installing atop will also (depending on your distro etc.) set it up to snapshot the system state every 600 seconds. If you run "atop -r" you can review that legacy old data from today or an older day, and switch between the 10-minute snapshot with t and T.
Personally i like "sar" for quick text only overview (sysstat package). Once enabled you have a 10 minute snapshot of a huge amount of performance metrics (e.g. sar -r for memory, sar -b for disk). Of course, it's even better if you use something to collect them centrally (I signed up for DataDog which takes very little effort to integrate compared to rolling your own stuff).
Re: Linux server monitoring tools
#50I'd like to recommend this book to get a current overview of monitoring tools: http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Enterprise-Brendan...
While most sysadm books are years out of date, this one covers all the hot recent stuff like Dtrace and its equivalents on Linux, pidstat etc. Solid coverage and the author (from Joyent) knows his stuff. Available on Safari too.