Experimenting with Amon: lightweight server and application monitoring

You know what I love more than puppies and Thanksgiving stuffing? Really great tools that are both awesome, and easy to use. Amon falls into that "awesome and easy" category.

Amon is a great monitoring solution for single-server applications that allows you to see, in just a few minutes, the critical statistics on your server, and its resources. This works because, while some may be all abuzz about scaling, the truth is that most applications out there (and certainly most test/dev apps) basically run on one or two servers - an app server, and a database server. If you're an independent developer, or someone working on a side/hobby project, then why would you go through all the work of setting up a complicated monitoring structure when you could just add Amon in literally 10 minutes?

I'm experimenting with Amon on two AWS Ubuntu instances, which you can see live: a test system that only runs Amon, and the production keyspace server, which basically runs a small JVM-based network utility. I haven't yet added exception logging to either of these servers, but I'm looking forward to doing that in the future.

Setting up Amon is basically three steps:

• Run curl install.amon.cx | bash
• Edit /etc/amon.conf with your specific settings
• Run sudo /etc/init.d/amon start

The Amon config file on my test system is a simple set of JSON settings, shown below:

{
    "acl": "False", 
    "system_check_period": 60, 
    "secret_key": "[omitted]", 
    "process_checks": [
        "ruby1.8",
	"mongo",
        "amon",
        "amond"
    ], 
    "web_app": {
        "host": "amon.karmanebula.com", 
        "port": "80"
    }, 
    "backend": {
        "mongo": {
            "host": "127.0.0.1", 
            "port": 27017
        }
    }
}

FedEx Day for all

FedEx Day is an idea put forth by the fine folks at Atlassian. At NUBIC, the department I work in at Northwestern University decided to try doing a FedEx day of our own. It wasn't long before the project idea discussions started, and people wondered, "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a place to post ideas and get feedback?"

A couple days later, the fedexday app was born - a very simple, no frills way to post an idea, and get feedback.

Below is a quick screen cap that gives you an idea of what the interface looks like. So, if you want to run a FedEx day at your workplace, now it's as simple as spinning up a small Rails app.

Users don't need to log in, and all submissions are anonymous by design. Simply post an idea, and others can comment and endorse the ideas to give you a rought measure of the level of interest. Everything in the app is free-form wiki style editing without restrictions.