Site Monitoring and Operations – Part 1

Although The startup I work for has a small infrastructure compared to other organizations, we strive to maintain maximum uptime and respond as quickly as possible when problems come up.

Site monitoring is part of this process – we needed a way to be informed about problems. Nothing is more embarrassing than getting a phone call from a user or customer saying, “Do you guys know your site is down?” We considered performing daily tests on each server – not only was this an inefficient use of our time, it wouldn’t help us if the site was alive at 8am only to be dead around noon. To solve this, we examined several options:

• Automated Site Test – Using our automated site test application (QTP) – we would run a series of simple login tests to verify the life of the site. This option was rejected for a variety of reasons, but chiefly because we needed a site monitoring system that could provide a single-look format for the health of our environment and although it would handle the site and application, an automated test wouldn’t test our mail capability.
• Outsourced Site Monitoring – Companies like Cittio and Siteuptime.com offer managed site monitoring. We may visit these in the future, but wanted to keep our budget as low as possible.
• Commercial Site Monitoring Software – Cricket, Big Brother and Site Scope are site monitoring softwares that are used in data center environments. As with outsourcing – we may visit this in the future, but we were looking for a cheaper way to do this, if it existed.
• Open-source software – Nagios is an open-source application that runs on Linux to provide site monitoring. Being open-source and free, it was attractive but was going to require that we run a Linux server. We were going to have to allocate a single server or desktop-as-server to run this application.

Another project we had on our plate was examining the use of server virtualization. Our application development environment is housed on three servers and those servers have more than a dozen different commercial and open-source tools installed on them to assist in developing our product. Upgrading a single application can prove problematic, especially if other tools utilize the same underlying program, like ASP, Perl or PHP.

Out of the open-source options for virtualization (We decided early on to stick with open-source and not to go with products like Microsoft’s virtual server), we decided to go with VMware. The decision to do so was pretty simple.

VMWare has been encouraging people to use their product by allowing individuals to build virtual appliances on their own and publish them to the rest of the world. The link to this page is here - http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ . A quick browse through the pages and we noted that someone had already built and published a Nagios virtual appliance. We downloaded it and started configuring it for our use.