Ubuntu Server Monitoring

Ubuntu Server Monitoring

Overview

Over half of CopperEgg collectors in the market are monitoring Ubuntu servers. This jives with market research reporting that Ubuntu is the leading cloud guest across the top public cloud providers including Amazon Web Services (EC2), Rackspace, and the HP Services cloud. It has also begun to make headway into private and hybrid clouds.

Ubuntu System Monitoring

CopperEgg RevealCloud monitors critical OS, system, and process statistics – in real-time – across Ubuntu servers in any cloud environment. In addition, RevealCloud real-time monitoring supports Windows, FreeBSD, MacOS X, and most other 2.6+ Linux distributions, including Debian, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Amazon, SuSE, openSuSE, Vyatta, and Gentoo.

Critical Ubuntu performance monitoring data collected includes:
• CPU utilization, per CPU and in-aggregate
• Details of the individual components of CPU utilization, including CPU steal and I/O wait
• Memory stats like cache, buffer, active
• Network TX and RX across each NIC and in-aggregate
• Disk volume consumption by volume
• Disk I/O
• Swap Activity
• Processes, CPU, and memory (like top on steroids)
• And many more.

Ubuntu Process Monitoring

3 ways Ubuntu process monitoring with RevealCloud can help you:

1. Easily identify a process that has consumed too much memory or CPU. If a system is running high on CPU or memory, you can detect which processes may need to be stopped or restarted.

2. Discover if an issue arises by 2 or more processes or jobs running simultaneously. This might cause a high load on the system and may extend the run time of the combined jobs as opposed to them running at various times. Example: running an AV scan while trying to do a backup.

3. Gain visibility into multiple CPUs to determine if a process or job may not be written to take advantage of multiple CPUs. If this was not visible, a job may take longer to execute than anticipated. With RevealCloud you can verify that a job is only using one CPU as opposed to multiple. Here is what a multiprocessor system should look like:

Cloud Automation Support

Many of our Ubuntu customers utilize our Chef recipe available at https://github.com/CopperEgg/revealcloud-chef.

Latest Ubuntu News & Helpful Links

• According to a survey reported in w3techs.com (http://w3techs.com/), Ubuntu is now used on 6% of all web servers, which is up from 4% one year ago. (Posted by Sam Soltano on February 28, 2012.)
• Ubuntu has been so successful in the cloud, that Canonical has introduced the ‘Ubuntu Cloud Guest’. This is a term referring to a set of Ubuntu images built by Canonical, that have been customized to run on cloud-platforms such as Amazon EC2, Openstack and LXC. They are available at http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/. These are also available for download, and can be run on the hypervisor of your choice, on your on-premise hardware.
• A set of pre-built AMI’s (Amazon Machine Images) are also readily available for all AWS Zones using the ‘AMI Locator’ which can be found here: http://cloud.ubuntu.com/ami/.
• Microsoft recently enabled Linux instances to run on its Windows Azure cloud computing platform. Azure now supports OpenSUSE 12.1, CentOS 6.2, Ubuntu 12.04 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2.
• In April of 2012, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was released (LTS stands for Long Term Support, which means that canonical will support this version for 5 years.)
• Ubuntu 12.04 (codenamed, Precise Pangolin) ships with an updated v3.2 series Linux kernel. The 12.04 release cycle has focused on deployment, stability and quality.
• Ubuntu 12.04 includes the latest OpenStack release, codenamed Essex. It also includes a new technology named ‘AWSOME’ which stands for “Any Web Service over Me”. This provides IAAS API’s for OpenStack which are also implemented by Amazon EC2. This brings us one step closer to a world of simple deployment and management of cloud services across both Amazon and OpenStack clouds.
• Canonical is offering to let you try out the Ubuntu Cloud Guest for an hour in the public cloud: https://try.cloud.ubuntu.com/

Install RevealCloud in less than a minute on your Ubuntu Cloud Guest and gain instant insight into the performance of 12.04! Ubuntu releases 8.04 and above are supported.