Re: is monit just a pain in the arse or what ?

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

On 27. jul. 2007, at 03.03, andrew taylor wrote:

> Normally, when I ask monit for status, I get this...
>
> address@hidden:~# monit summary
> monit: cannot read status from the monit daemon
>
> This happens constantly and is frustrating and useless.

Could you please check that you do not block the monit port number  
with a firewall. When you do a 'monit summary' or 'monit status'  
monit will connect to the monit daemon over a socket connection to  
read status. To check that nothing is blocking this connection you  
can also try 'telnet localhost 2812' (assuming 2812 is the monit HTTP  
port number) to verify that you can connect to the monit daemon.

> When I do get data, it tells me something like this...
>
> Process 'rails_mongrel_9200' Execution failed
> Process 'rails_mongrel_9201' Execution failed
> Process 'rails_job' running
> Process 'rails_mailer' Execution failed
>
>
> uhh...not quite, if I ps, all the processes are running, all the  
> pids are there, everything is fine.

Monit check if a process is running by reading and validating the pid  
(process id) from a pid file. The problem you report here indicate  
that either the path to the file is wrong or the program or script  
staring the process does not write the correct process id to the pid  
file. You should check this.

> When I ask monit to start/stop by group, it usually ignores me.
>
>
> All these monit features, and to me, the basics are not even right.

Well, if you configure monit to aim at your foot and pull the trigger  
it will happily do just that :-)


> I am running Ubuntu Feisty server with the apt-get monit installed,  
> so I did not screw anything up in the build/install.

All this looks like problems with your monit configuration. We could  
help more (I hope) if you post a copy of your monit control file as  
well as the monit version you are using. (I don't know which version  
comes with Ubuntu).

You can also try running the monit daemon in debug mode from the  
console like so 'monit -Iv' and query it using 'monit -v summary'  
this should output some useful debug info to the console, which may  
help debugging the problems you have with monit.