Monitoring Software for Ubuntu 8.10 on Slicehost?

Question

I am new to server administration and I am looking for some options for monitoring my slice (ruby on rails site) on slicehost. Ideally, a live view of status and loads would be great.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Slicehost & Scout

We've been using scout to monitor our Rails apps and their slices on slicehost. Works pretty well and is very, very easy to install. Key features for me are the (reasonably) wide set of monitoring agents and the low cost.

Scout and NewRelic

To answer ChrisH's comment I did a comparison with NewRelic after having used Scout for a few months.

NewRelic presents the same information as Scout but in a nicer format.

NewRelic is able to monitor an application which has been split over multiple hosts - not something that Scout can do. However you probably don't need to scale Slicehost horizontally when it is so easy to scale vertically.

Scout gives more monitoring options for free and the first tier commercial offering is cheaper ($15 v $40) but they limit the amount of historical data you can store.

Scout seems to have a wider set of monitoring options - they have an open agent api which makes it simple to develop new agents - so you can get things like memcache monitoring.

One thing I don't like about Scout is that they don't manage exceptions. Not sure if New Relic does this but it seems like a huge hole in the monitoring offering

Chris