Nagios and Rails Monitoring

Question

We want to use Nagios for monitoring a Rails app. The reason is we just don't have a Rails app; we have Java and .Net apps and we want to use Nagios for all different apps; to have a centralized monitoring system. I know there are some great monitoring tools such as New Relic,Monit,etc. out there but they didn't want to go with anything different than Nagios. I am looking for a Nagios plugin to check the latency(uptime,downtime, how long does it take a page to load,response time,etc.) of our Rails app and couldn't find a good Nagios plugin. Does anybody know of a good Nagios plugin for monitoring latency in a Rails App? Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Uptime, downtime, response_time is handled by almost every nagios plugin. The standard check_http plugin should work. Be sure to test a real page (for example, a dynamic page) for the response time. If you test a static page, it might not hit the database etc and your response times will be incorrect (too perfect). If you run rails on a non-standard port, you can override the port it checks on with -p: http://nagiosplugins.org/man/check_http

A long time ago, in a previous life, I used Nagios for up/down but used Cacti for trending.

Also, this should be moved to serverfault.

Answer 2

An alternative to Nagios would be its fork, Icinga. Differs mainly in its new dynamic web interface, database flexibility and development style. It is compatible with Nagios plugins and configs, so the above would work too.