Re: Alert if file contents are greater than 40

[Callum Macdonald]

Hi Jenny,

Have you considered having monit measure the program's memory usage?

I think this line of the manual may be relevant to your situation:

On startup the read position is set to the end of the file and monit 
continue to scan to the end of file on each cycle. But if the file size 
should decrease or inode change the read position is set to the start of 
the file.

As I understand it, monit will probably read the file once, then wait 
for new lines to be written. In your case, if the filesize remains the 
same or increases, monit will never again read the first (and only) line 
of the file.

I think this feature is aimed at log file monitoring, when data is 
constantly being written to a continuous log file. If you were to write 
a new line to the file every 10 minutes and then truncate it every so 
often, that might work. But honestly, it all sounds far more complicated 
than letting monit measure your memory usage.

Love & joy - Callum.

On 11/01/13 05:26, Dimitri Yioulos wrote:
> On Thursday 10 January 2013 4:24:27 pm Jenny Hopkins wrote:
> > Hullo,
> >
> > I've been having an issue with memory hungry programs so
> > have written a script that takes a user and program
> > params and stuffs the memory usage into a file as an
> > integer. This is run by cron every ten minutes.
> > I want monit to keep an eye on the file contents and
> > alert if it exceeds a certain figure.
> > So far, I can only find evidence that monit supports text
> > file matches. I've tried
> >
> > "check file memfile.irssi with path /tmp/memfile.irssi
> > if  match "[4-9][0-9]" then alert"
> >
> > but this doesn't seem to work. I'm adding a \n to the end
> > of the file.
> >
> > Sorry if this has been asked before.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Jenny
>
>
> Er, Jenny. not to diss the capabilities of Monit, but why
> don't you simply extend your script to send out an email
> alert based on a memory usage threshhold?