Jenkins for monitoring application in prod

Question

While I'm interested in Jenkins as a means to provide continuous build functionality, I'm really even more interested in Jenkins as a means to exercise my application in its prod environment against unexpected changes in infrastructure beyond my control that may effect my application. I can't find a ton of information on using Jenkins in this way, but I was wondering if there are others out there doing this? Essentially I have a project that runs maven test parametized with my prod url, but for these projects I don't actually do any building. Are there other tools besides Jenkins I should be considering to do this? If so, why?

Answer 1

If you've got your tests set up to run via Maven already, I think Jenkins would be a good option. You could set up email, IM or SMS alerts using Jenkins plugins, and keep a record of the results within Jenkins.

The only down sides I can think of are:

1. You'll probably want to run your monitoring a lot more frequently than a regular CI job, so you might want to keep more build records than the default of 10.
2. If you already have a system like Nagios or OpenView to monitor system resources, it might be better to integrate app monitoring into that rather than having another source of truth.