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Looking for advice as to effectively monitoring the load of a production web server.

  • Preferably solution will be free or minimal cost (server is owned by a very small web development company - read one-man band).
  • Server hosts multiple websites (applications)
  • Solution would preferably have notification ability (email is okay)
  • Monitoring and notification when an application is not serving dynamic - Lucee (CFML) content.
  • Monitoring and notification when an application is not serving static content.

Web-based panel showing:

  • Current visitors per application + overall
  • Memory Breakdown
  • Any errors being delivered to visitors

Server is running the following:

  • EC2 Instance - Amazon AMI HVM
  • Tomcat 7
  • Lucee 4.5.1.003 final

This is my first post to ServerFault, so please forgive me. Thank you for any assistance and advice.

Peter Boughton
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Daniel Jansen
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  • `This is my first post to ServerFault, so please forgive me.` This question may be salvageable if you're wiling to rewrite it into a general "how do I monitor a webserver" question, but is off topic as it is. – HopelessN00b Feb 19 '15 at 06:38
  • There are many ways to monitor a Web server at various layers and in various ways - ping services, JVM monitoring tools, OS process monitors, etc. Maybe edit your question with specifics once you are working on a particular solution and need assistance. – Robert Munn Feb 19 '15 at 08:31
  • Why does the [edit history](http://serverfault.com/posts/669560/revisions) *falsely* claim I added the [tag:Java] tag? I added [tag:Lucee] - as the [review](http://serverfault.com/review/suggested-edits/179059) shows. Did one of the reviewers change my edit (if so, why doesn't the review show it), or did someone else alias the tag afterwards, or what? – Peter Boughton Feb 19 '15 at 21:14

1 Answers1

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I would say you have two options here:

  1. AWS Cloud Watch (http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/), which you can use to measure lots of metrics about the instance, e.g. CPU usage, memory usage, etc... and this has notification as well. You can also use it with AWS's auto-scaling option to scale out and in if required. This option however will not measure the performance of a particular application like Tomcat or Lucee specifically. I believe it is free for the 5 minute frequency option or a very small fee for the 1 minute frequency (http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/).
  2. Fusion Reactor (http://www.fusion-reactor.com/) which is specifically for monitoring the Java application, in this case Tomcat and Lucee. This is a commercial application however I think it is pretty inexpensive at $24 per month (but you pay yearly!!!). Fusion Reactor offers you an excellent range of data points, notifications and active protection (e.g. it can do stuff to stop things going wrong). It works well and I would say it is worth the cost.

Personally I would do both!!!

andrewdixon
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