Monitoring System Performance

[geniosity]

I know VPS.net supplies the little CPU and Bandwidth graphs, but can anybody recommend something a little more detailed for monitoring system usage?

I'm looking for something along the lines of seeing what keeps the server busy, when it gets busy, etc. (I say "busy" because I mean CPU and Network and Memory, etc).

I've seen Munin, but I'm wondering what other people use. Again (as is my excuse everytime I post something here) I'm looking for something that experienced admins do/use. (Best practices). Maybe an indication of envygeeks' daemons?

[webicero]

I'm sure envygeeks will have a decent recommendation for you on this

[envygeeks]

It depends on what you mean.

[geniosity]

I just meant being able to monitor at a more detailed level what's using the CPU, Memory, etc.

I'm wondering how experienced admins watch to see what might be misbehaving on the system that may not actually have to run. Or even, let's say I have a php script that takes more resources than it should, how would I know exactly?

(Yes, totally newbie questions)

[Auraka]

Check out www.serverdensity.com, it is a pretty minimalist setup and should give you some good data.

[Ditlev]

Originally Posted by Auraka

Check out www.serverdensity.com, it is a pretty minimalist setup (...)

I like it though!


D

[Ditlev]

do you know any alternatives to Serverdensity.com?

[envygeeks]

Where on ServerDensity.Com does it mention it's key exchange and it's encryption policy? You aren't telling me it seriously exchanges server data without a random symmetric key exchange using Diffie-Hellman? HTTPS really isn't secure IMO for this type of thing. I would really love it if it sent out a stat on a program without encryption. Just let me know where I can drop my MITM attack, Kthnxbai.

[Ditlev]

Originally Posted by envygeeks

Where on ServerDensity.Com does it mention it's key exchange and it's encryption policy? You aren't telling me it seriously exchanges server data without a random symmetric key exchange using Diffie-Hellman? HTTPS really isn't secure IMO for this type of thing. I would really love it if it sent out a stat on a program without encryption. Just let me know where I can drop my MITM attack, Kthnxbai.

I asked them, this is their answer:

We consider most of the data to be non-sensitive because it is only
generalised statistics such as load an memory usage.

Process information is sent which could be considered more sensitive
but only contains basic information such as the process name, the
owner user and resource usage breakdowns.

Data is only sent 1 way from the agent on the monitored server to
Server Density. This can be via HTTPS which we believe is sufficiently
secure for the type of information being sent. I would be interested
to know why your client does not think HTTPS is secure for sending
basic server stats when it is used for online shopping, banking, etc.

The agent itself runs as a regular user on the server - it does not
require any special privileges or root access. It is also open source
(BSD License) so the code can be analysed if necessary.

D

[Ditlev]

this is what the free version looks like btw