Monitoring

In this part of the “Building for Production: Web Applications” series (5 of 6), we will add monitoring to improve our awareness of the state of our servers and services. Monitoring software, such as Nagios, Icinga, and Zabbix, enables you to create dashboards and alerts that will show you which components of your application setup need attention. The goal of this is to help you detect issues with your setup, and start fixing them, before your users encounter them.

StatsD is a statistics collection daemon that can be configured to collect arbitrary statistics from applications. It is extremely flexible and allows you to use Graphite in a much more powerful way. In this guide, we’ll discuss how to install and configure StatsD to collect and send metrics to Graphite. We will be doing this on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.

In this tutorial, we will go over the installation of Icinga, an open source monitoring system, on Ubuntu 14.04. We will cover some basic configuration, so you will be able to monitor network services and host resources via the web interface. We will also utilize the Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE), that will be installed as an agent on remote systems to monitor their local resources (disk usage, number of logged in users, etc.).