Christopher J. Buckley

Recently, i’ve become aware of a fantastic monitoring tool that allows easy visilibity of server clusters. The program is called Munin. The authors address their program as:

[Munin] The monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine “what’s different today” when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you’re doing capacity-wise on any resources.

So, i’ve implemented Munin across my platform of servers - as I write this I have implemented monitoring of my load-balancer and web/mailserver box. There is a secondary web-server to be bought online soon.

Of special interest to me in this program is the ability to track the replication of MySQL, I can now easily see (and be alerted to via Nagios) any lag in my replication ’seconds behind master’ time.

Please take a look at the monitoring information at: monitors.cjbuckley.net