[sf-perl] Server downtime reporting and recovery

[Daniel Lo]

Hello Matt,

The best test for this is one that is done externally.  For example another website
checks your website. :)

Some sites will even preform metrics such as how long it takes to load and graph
that over a period of time.  Some sites will also do it from different parts of
the world/country.

-daniel



Tuesday, February 24, 2009, 5:13:57 PM, you wrote:

> Hi all,

> I was curious about how those of you who work with web aps deal with
> minimizing downtime when a particular service dies for whatever
> reason.  I'm not a sysadmin by training, rather it is a responsibility
> that no one else seemed willing to take.  Right now I have a perl
> script that runs as a cron job every five minutes, checking the status
> of the various services on the server and restarting and reporting if
> anything is amiss.

> I've been told that my production schedule needs to be pushed forward
> and five minutes of downtime will soon be unacceptable.  Since I've
> got a .NET app running in mono (which has not been kind to me) I need
> to catch problems as quickly as possible and restart the service.
> Most frequently the mono app will just hang indefinitely, not crash
> outright.  With the new schedule I don't have time to fix (read
> replace) the problematic app before I go live.

> So my question, what do you folks recommend as far as checking the
> status of services more frequently than every 5 minutes?  Would you
> recommend sticking with perl, or this there some FOSS that would
> better serve my purposes?  In my research, I've found programs like
> Nagios, but don't know much about them. I'd prefer not to add too much
> the way of overhead, but I also don't want to reinvent the wheel.

> Sorry if this is a little off topic.

> Thanks,

> Matt
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-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel                            mailto:woof at danlo.com