Apache Server Performance Monitoring

Question

I've recently setup a new apache webserver with the basic LAMP stack (PHP / MySQL / Apache). I'm curious what kind of performance monitoring solutions are typical -- really, I'm simply looking for a good way to gauge whether the host I've setup is beefy enough to handle the load put on it.

For now, I've been checking the load on the server every so often with the uptime command as to examine the historical averages. I've also been checking the apache server-status page (which is only visible locally).

Anyway, I don't feel as though these are really providing what I'm looking for. I'd appreciate any advice and / or nudges in the right direction.

Thanks a bunch!

Sam

Answer 1

womble's answer gives you great list of parameters to monitor.

i suggest you go for munin as simple tool for gathering stats and plotting charts with the trends. if you need something more advanced - maybe zabbix or cacti, if you need rock-solid alerting system - nagios.

few things to add to measured parameters:

• baseline of mysql queries [ munin's standard mysql plugin will do it for you ] - how many queries of each type, how many slow queries [ enable in my.cnf logging of those eg longer than 1-2 sec - log will come handy when you'll be searching for biggest offenders ]
• apache's stats - number of idle worker processes, number of page requested/sec [ again munin's plugin will do it for you ].
• total number of process

most probably you'll find munin with it's plugins in your distro's standard repository. it's light and if you don't need more features - i suggest you start with it.

and yeah - already start thinking about shifting static content to some high performance server like nginx/mathopd/lighthttpd [ if you have just 1 public ip look here ].

Answer 2

I use Munin to monitor my Apache server on running on Ubuntu. Getting Munin running was very easy, and getting the Apache plugin going required just a little more work.