monit

We had an apache process that wasn't restarting cleanly and kept waking us up in the middle of the night to restart. Having heard about monit at Atlanta Startup Weekend, I decided to give it a try.

I was able to download, compile, install, setup, and test monit in about 15 minutes.

Docs are great, the configuration DSL is easy and powerful, and I am very impressed so far.

I see monit making me sleep better at night already...

I started using monit in 2003 after having looked at mon(8) and following the more experienced colleague who was packaging them both for ALT Linux back then.

Suffice to say that it has served me well ever since, both in commecrial and hobby environment -- keeping systems from overload or disk shortage, and notifying me in advance of the real trouble.

collectd(8) is nice companion to monit(8), BTW.