John Beynon

Serverdensity.com is a new UK based, hosted server monitoring solution. Think Nagios, but given a Web 2.0 makeover but not quite as many features and certainly not as complicated to configure. I’m not sure where I heard about them from, but I’m glad I did.

Monitoring is done via an agent (written in python) installed on the server to give access to various standard metrics as well as stats exposed by mod_status on Apache. At the moment it’s only supported on Linux/OSX but they are working on a Windows agent.

Server Density provides both a web based dashboard as well as an iPhone application (free). The dashboard displays summary data as well as various graphs which reveal what’s going on on your server. Alerts can be configured against metrics and delivered via email, sms as well as iPhone notifications! My first iPhone application which uses notifications! Woohoo!

You’re able to trial the full service for 30 days, after which you can continue to monitor a single server but without the pleasure of the iPhone app, limited alerts and data is only retained for 1 month. After the trial period is over it’s going to cost you £10/$15 a month per server – a tad pricey I think though.

I’ve been using it for a few days now and already have caught 2 instances where my server was overloaded and using overly high amounts of resources – no real bother since I’m running on the Rackspace Cloud so just allocated more resources to my server.

The team behind it also have an excellent blog at http://blog.boxedice.com which has some *REALLY* insightful posts into how they outgrew Virtual Servers, moving from a relational DB to a non relational DB (MongoDB) and how they implemented iPhone push notifications – it’s well worth subscribing too!

If you’re in the market for server monitoring then it’s worth taking a look at!

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