Server Monitoring
→ What is a Server?
A Server is a machine that your website or web app runs on. Typically you rent a server from a Server Provider. There are many providers: Hetzer, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Google, Amazon, and so on. All provide smaller or larger servers, virtual or dedicated. Each server has a number of CPUs (physical or logical), a certain size of memory (RAM) and a certain size of disk space. We call these 'resources'. Servers can sometimes run out of resources. There are many reasons for a server to run out of resources:
- Database gets too big
- Logfiles get too big
- Machine is running out of available memory
- Your app is doing a lot of processing, so that it is running out of CPU power
- and many more
→ What happens if my server is running out of resources?
When your server is running out of resouces, your app's performance will probably degrade more and more. It might then stop working completely. When the disk is full, database updates may fail, and you might lose customers, miss business opportunities, or just disapoint users of your app.
→ How can Monibot help, then?
With Monibot, you can instruct your server to send periodic resource usage samples to Monibot. Monibot will collect these usage samples, aggregate them and present them in nice charts, so you can check in advance if our server will be running out of resources.
→ How do I setup a machine with Monibot?
Here are the steps required:
- Login to Monibot, and enter the 'Machines' section
- Click the 'New Machine' Button
- Enter a human-friendly name of your machine.
That's it. From now on, Monibot will listen to and collect samples from your server.
→ How do I send resource usage samples from my server?
The moni command line tool, which is available for Linux servers, collects CPU, memory and disk usage numbers from the local machine, and sends them to Monibot in regular intervals. The tool is a single Linux binary with no dependencies, light on resources, easy to install, and can be downloaded from here. It's written in Go and Open Source. If you wish you can build it yourself. Please see our Docs for more information.