Monit Web Service not available

Question

I'm trying to configure monit on my server using chef solo. When I visit port 2812 response saying this webpage is not availble.

config/chef/files/default/monitrc

set daemon 30
set pidfile /var/run/monit_real.pid
set logfile syslog facility log_daemon
set idfile /var/monit/id
set statefile /var/monit/state
set eventqueue
    basedir /var/monit/events
    slots 100
set httpd port 2812
    allow admin:"secret"
include /etc/monit/conf.d/*

monit recipe

package 'monit' do
  action :install
end

service "monit" do
  supports :status => true, :restart => true, :start => true,:stop => true
  action [ :enable, :start ]
end

directory '/etc/monit' do
  owner 'deploy'
  group 'deploy'
  mode '0755'
  recursive true
  action :create
  notifies :restart, resources(:service => "monit"), :immediate
end

cookbook_file '/etc/monit/monitrc' do
  source 'monitrc'
  owner 'deploy'
  group 'deploy'
  mode '0755'
  action :create
end

cookbook_file '/etc/monit/conf.d/puma.conf' do
  source 'monit-puma'
  owner 'deploy'
  group 'deploy'
  mode '0755'
  action :create
end

cookbook_file '/etc/monit/conf.d/nginx.conf' do
  source 'monit-nginx'
  owner 'deploy'
  group 'deploy'
  mode '0755'
  action :create
end

execute 'sudo monit reload'
execute 'sudo monit start all'

Answer 1

Part of this is debugging why monit won't start up.

With the log statement of logfile syslog... you should look at your syslog daemon's output for logging details. I modified the monitrc to use a file for simpler debugging, like so:

set logfile /var/log/monit.log

The output shows:

[UTC Mar  3 13:13:14] info     : Starting monit daemon with http interface at [*:2812]
[UTC Mar  3 13:13:14] error    : Cannot open for write -- No such file or directory

So one of the configuration directives is pointing at a path that does not exist.

You can also run the monit command interactively to get more details.

/usr/bin/monit -c /etc/monit/monitrc -I -vv

This will emit a lot of great debug information.

In this case, we can see that the same message is repeated:

Cannot open for write -- No such file or directory

Unfortunately, the output doesn't tell us which file or directory is being attempted.

Looking at the config, we can see paths that start with /var/monit/ - but no associated resource to create these paths in your Chef recipe.

# ls /var/monit
ls: cannot access /var/monit: No such file or directory

So this would indicate that the monit daemon is trying to open/write state, id, and queue files in a path that doesn't exist.

The default paths used in the Ubuntu package for monit use /var/lib/monit/ - you can change your config to use that path, or you can add another resource to your recipe to create the desired path.