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Get started with application monitoring

Monibot collects, aggregates and monitors your application's metrics, for example:

• Number of served HTTP requests
• Database size
• Number of registrered users
• Anything that can be expressed in numbers

In this article, we will, as an example, monitor the number of registrered users for a hypothetical web app. We assume that the web app stores its users in some kind of a database. The database can be a SQL database, a JSON file, or some other persistent storage.

Create a metric entry in Monibot

• Log into your Monibot account. If you don't have one, register now, it's free.
• In the main menu, click on the 'Metrics' link. Here you'll see a 'New Metric' button.
• Click the 'New Metric' button. Enter a name, for example 'User Count'. You can chose any name here, it's used only for display.
• As metric type, select 'Gauge'. A gauge metric is a metric that can go up and down, much like a car's speedometer.
• Click 'Save'. Your metric is now ready and waits for data from your application.

Each new metric gets a unique ID, which Monibot shows on the screen. You will need that ID later.

Send metrics with Go

The Monibot Go SDK is a library for accessing the Monibot REST Api with Go. You can install it with the following command:

user@host:~/my-app$ go get github.com/cvilsmeier/monibot-go

In your code, make a function that sends the current user count to Monibot. Here is a sample code:

// file: main.go

package main

import (
	"log"
	"math/rand"
	"os"
	"time"

	"github.com/cvilsmeier/monibot-go"
)

func main() {
    // initialize monibot api
    const apiKey = "c757bda424b92e4028659610f9071f03"
    api := monibot.NewApi(apiKey)

    // query database for current user count
    userCount := loadUserCountFromDatabase()

    // send user count to Monibot
    const metricId = "90d0091348a79f137b489713c74713e4"
    err := api.PostMetricSet(metricId, userCount)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
}

You can invoke this code manually, by issuing the follogin command:

user@host:~/my-app$ go run main.go

You can also put this command in your crontab, so that is is executed every 5 minutes:

user@host:~$ crontab -l
MONIBOT_API_KEY=c757bda424b92e4028659610f9071f03
METRIC_ID=90d0091348a79f137b489713c74713e4
*/5 * * * *  cd /home/user/my-app && go run main.go

Send metrics with Python

You don't have to use Go for using Monibot. In fact, any HTTP library in any programming language can be used. Here's a python sample:

import requests

# hardcoded values for demonstration purposes only
apiKey = "c757bda424b92e4028659610f9071f03"

# load user count from DB
userCount = loadUserCountFromDatabase()

# send to Monibot
metricId = "90d0091348a79f137b489713c74713e4"
url = 'https://monibot.io/api/metric/'+metricId+'/set'
data = "value={}".format(userCount)
print("data: ", data)
headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer '+apiKey
}
res = requests.post(url, data=data, headers=headers)
print("res: ", res, res.text)