Monitor Your Server / VPS With LoadAVG & VPSInfo

It’s been a long time since I had to monitor any VPS and Dedicated Servers, however when I did, two scripts were used on an hourly basis to check the health and activity of the servers I worked with.

They’re called VPSinfo and LoadAVG - they’re both PHP fronts to several command line outputs written by Doug Robbins, and allow you in one quick glance to see the current health of your environment ( current load, memory and hard-drive usage, http + mysql thread numbers etc ) and the load history of your server for the past month.

VPSInfo : http://www.labradordata.ca/home/13
LoadAVG : http://www.labradordata.ca/home/37

They’re both very simple to setup (( some functions require helper apps to be installed by you in shell ) but they’re mostly just php files + cron jobs), remember to put them in password protected web directories! And their outputs are invaluable when assessing high loads, apache optimization and script runaways.

LoadAVG itself is a lifesaver as it allows you to check at a glance whether any Apache or MySQL optimizations you introduce work and help bring down server loads. Also it helps you identify when you are receiving load spikes each day, so you can be better prepared to face the high loads head-on, and be there to monitor your environment when they happen.

I’d recommend them to anyone who needs to keep a close eye on their server environment.