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I wonder how do you verify if the server works correctly after some configuration changes or patch installation? I found it quite hard to check for example if all applications running on the server were not impacted by changes you made. Do you know any "automated" way of checking such things? | |||
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This is what system monitoring is used for. You have the monitoring system checking all sites and services running on the server, and then if you break anything (or it breaks by itself) you know about it. | |||
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Well what you really need to do before all this, is determine what you assessment of working properly is. You need to look at your server, and what it is doing and say, ok for this server to be working correctly, it needs to be successfully doing X Y and Z. This could be that it needs to be correctly serving web pages, receiving emails and allowing FTP access, for a web server. If that's the case then yes you can automate it, you can have some monitoring services or scripts that check these services, or access these web pages etc. | |||
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What you my be looking for is called monitoring software. See e.g. the stuff under http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/monitoring to get an idea. Most monitoring software will do simple checks out of the box (port open / website loads / service such as FTP/SMTP/etc. responds). If you need more exhaustive checks (check that a certain web page contains certain text etc.) you will have to write them yourself (as that is app-specific), but the software will help you. I can personally recommend ZenOSS, but there are many available. | |||
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Depends on the server service, really. For most, you can do the following (off the top of my head);
You can't really fully test it or fully know if the system is working because bug fixes may create edge cases where it's not working properly under certain circumstances. Do you mean instead that you want to verify that services are back up on servers after updates? In that case programs like Nagios should be perfect. Do you mean test that the servers are functioning appropriately? That to my knowledge means either writing your own test cases or manually testing since, for example, your web server may come up but it's doling out error messages because your database service that the web server relies on for your application is dead. EDIT: Okay, NAGIOS can monitor at the service level; I mean that the services may be "there" but something is affected in a way that it's giving out errors, so relying on automation will give a false sense of security. We've had cases where our Cisco phone system (Callmanager) seemed to be working fine only to discover after a good length of time that certain voicemails weren't properly routing to the mail server; we didn't know until investigating users saying they were told they had voicemail they never got...automated monitoring of services would not catch this without specifically checking logs since everything on Callmanager said it was functional). If you have a specific need or specific case you might want to narrow it down a little and see what hits you get here. I see a similar parallel in hardware; how can I verify that my upgraded memory is working in my computer? "Boot it up and use it." Doesn't mean you're not going to see weird crashes because the memory isn't quite seated properly or has a tiny manufacturing defect that shows up at a particular temperature range, however. This is another reason to consider virtualization. You can minimize impacts of upgrades, make it easier to recover from issues, and compartmentalize services more easily to individual servers (web server handles web tasks, etc.) as well as monitor disk use and network use to get a picture of the health of your servers a little more easily. Just throwing that out there as something to consider should the opportunity arise :-) | |||
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