Monit Aggregator - an open source Sinatra app
What's Monit?
When it comes to Server Monitoring, there are usually a few common things that go wrong. One of the main ones is that occasioanally, processes just die. The best solution for this is to have something installed on each server that watches these processes and can restart them if they either go down or start using up too many resources.
There are a few different open source solutions available for doing this, the main one is Monit. Monit is fairly easy to get installed and will usually get these dead processes back up and running again within seconds. Monit comes with a useful web interface for viewing information on the health of your services. If you manage a lot of servers, then it becomes a bit of a pain as you have to access each monit interface on a seperate URL.
Say hello Monit Aggregator!
To make things a bit easier, we built a tool to aggregate these into 1 interface. We have also open sourced the code so that you can run it yourself on one of your own servers. Its written in Sinatra, the lightweight classy Ruby framework. and is hosted on Github If you don't want to go to the trouble of installing it yourself, we have a hosted version in the Runs Like Clockwork admin panel. You don't even need to be commit to a price plan. Just sign up, click the "My Monit" tab at the top and add your Monit instances totally free.
Don't just rely on Monit though!
Monit is great and should be one of the first things you install on a new server, but you shouldn't totally rely solely on Monit. Monit cannot for example, check that your webserver is accessible from outside your internal network, or that your web server is serving the correct site. Because of this, you should always have a backup in place that can monitor each of your sites from outside of your Network from different locations.