Yay for automated monitoring software. Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/ http://www.nagios.org/) does this for networks (and is extendable for some other things).

Yay for automated monitoring software. Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/ http://www.nagios.org/) does this for networks (and is extendable for some other things). At my old job we used Hobbit (http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/ http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/) to watch our Java server instances (memory usage, etc.). There’s no reason why these monitoring programs couldn’t be used to monitor internal program statistics, as long as those stats were made available. Generally you monitor from your internal network, and then provide some hook for the monitor to get information that’s only accessible from there. (SSH or a limited-access URL, etc.) Monitoring programs are super-powerful and generally complex. Check them out — it’s a good skill to have when working with production software. (I also posted this on the article.)