Server monitoring with Munin and Monit
I was looking for a good way to find out about my server stats, which are kind of low with slicehost’s most basic offering, and finally came across two pieces of software, Munin and Monit.
Munin generates tons of graphs of system statistics from CPU and Memory usage to load averages, open files and lots more and generates web content that lets you quickly see the health/performance of your system.
Monit is for more automated monitoring and runs as a daemon on your server. You can configure it to watch lots of different things including CPU and Memory usage and whether or not various services are running. It then alerts you when your specified conditions are tripped, such as if memory usage goes over a certain percentage, or if CPU utilization stays high for a given amount of time. It can also watch processes and if they die it will restart them.
The best guide (it also has helpful links to more details) I could find is called Server Monitoring With munin And monit found on a site I’m going to have to check out more, HowToForge.