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From: Nikolai Lusan <nikolai.lusan@hitwise.com>
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Organization: Hitwise
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2006 10:43:54 +1100
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Subject: Re: [users@httpd] Apache 2.2.3 monitor

Greetings,

On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 08:59 -0500, Lucuk, Pete wrote:

> I am now wrapping up my Apache setup with a maintenance in mind.
> I would like to setup something that would…
>         - test to see is Apache is up or down
>         - if Apache is up, do nothing
>         - if Apache is down, bring it back up ASAP

Where are you doing the monitoring? from the host that is running
apache? or from another host? And do you really think it is wise for a
monitoring system to blindly restart something that may be failing for a
good reason? potentially locking up your system?


> I could write some Java or a shell script that pinged a web page on
> Apache or something like that, BUT that seems kinds clunky in 2006 to
> do that.

And would have been the wrong way to do it in 1996. Have you heard of
ps, netstat or snmp? The only need to connect to the web server at all
(for monitoring purposes) is to verify that it is serving a particular
vhost or has a particular ssl cert loaded.  


> Is there something already available out there that meets the above
> requirements that is the standard correct way to monitor Apache and
> start it if it goes down?

There is no "standard" way to monitor anything, and it depends on the
architecture of your monitoring system. If you are running a single
server then you can just run a script from cron that does a ps and looks
for running processes (if the script has the correct permissions it
could restart things, but this is a bad idea(tm) - you should probably
have an admin look into why it failed instead of blindly restarting). If
you are wanting to monitor things from a remote location (ie. another
host) you should look at snmp and rolling either rolling your own
monitoring solution around that or using something like Nagios
(http://www.nagios.org/) although be aware I think the apache monitoring
"plugins" for nagios are garbage and come with too much overhead.


As another person suggested, if you can't bare for the apache server to
be offline for a few minutes then look into and redundant HA setup.

-- 

Nikolai Lusan
Systems Administrator

Hitwise Pty. Ltd.
Level 7 / 580 St Kilda Road
Melbourne, Victoria 3004
Australia
Phone: +61 3 8530 2400
Fax:  +61 3 9529 8907
www.hitwise.com.au
nikolai.lusan@hitwise.com


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