Posted by j0k3z on June 4, 2010 at 7:49pm
My website went down today and I couldnt figure out what the issue was. Eventually restarting varnish brought the site back.
Any idea why varnish might have randomly stopped running?
Were can I find logs to see what the issue was?
What is the best way to monitor a server so I know when things go down or if resources running low?
Comments
re: Varnish randomly stopped?
I've not seen an issue with varnish crashing. Unfortunately the varnish log is disabled by default due to the amount of space it can take. You can enable it by uncommenting the VARNISHLOG_ENABLED=1 variable in /etc/default/varnishlog (If on AWS, I would first symlink /var/log/varnish to an EBS volume to keep the logs form filling the root filesystem).
You might also look to see if there's anything in the /var/log/syslog file indicating what happened.
We hope to soon start addressing server monitoring within the mercury project. There are many options - likley we'll be going with munin (similar to cacti). Varnish has some nice built-in monitoring apps - especially varnishstat.
Hope this helps,
Greg
--
Greg Coit
Systems Administrator
http://www.chapterthree.com
What is the best way to
The "industry standard" would be Nagios. It will give you an early email/sms warning on resource limits of your machine (load, memory, disk, ...) and also on service up/down states (apache, mysql, website in general). However, nagios takes a day to set up for the first time.
Munin would be useful to graph that same data over time (memory, disk, mysql, ...). So you can see what went wrong. But munin will not issue any warnings. Also it will not react to any problems. Munin, however, is really easy to set up within the hour.
Both feature a web interface.
In your case, a simple website monitoring service would have done it, though.
http://www.google.de/search?q=website+monitoring
This happened on our server also
Hi,
Same issue happened on our server also.. Load on the server was just fine, apache and all the services were running quite good and I was able to access the website using domain.com:8080, but not as domain.com
After restarting the varnish service site is working fine.. am monitoring the server for now.
Regards
Sreyas