We’ve been quite busy pushing new features out to our server monitoring service, Server Density, so I’d like to take a moment to highlight what we’ve been up to!
Process not running alerts with regular expression matching
One of our oldest features is alerts when a process is no longer running. This has always been based on an exact match against the process name but we now have regular expression matching.
As you start typing you’ll be given suggestions matched against the latest process list we have for the selected server. And if you enter a regular expression the matching processes will be listed in real time.
Regular expressions are auto detected when they start and end with a forward slash. Any errors in your syntax will also be highlighted in real time because we know regexes can be a pain to write!
Spike analysis
After 72 hours data gets summarised to display the daily mean and the high and low values for that day. We’re now also calculating the standard deviation and storing values outside those ranges so you can still see the spikes in your historical data.
This is shown as a new tab on the graphs and allows you to view the data on a daily basis for all metrics. The next improvement planned is to store the process list for each spike so you can see exactly what was causing the problem.
Windows MongoDB monitoring
Our advanced MongoDB monitoring with additional statistics for replica sets, databases and the shiny MongoDB dashboard is now available in a new Windows agent release (1.3.0.0).
This release is signed for security and now has the option to disable logging to the Windows event log. It also includes some important updates to how we get process information using performance counters, so is recommended for everyone. Just launch the Server Density helper application from your Start Menu and it will automatically check for updates and prompt you to download and install.
However, note that if you intend to use the new enhanced MongoDB monitoring then you need to uninstall your existing agent and reinstall the latest version. We also require .NET 3.5 (if you do not need the enhanced MongoDB monitoring then you don’t need to do anything special – the agent will still work on .NET 2.0).
The enhanced MongoDB support uses the new C# driver from 10gen, which works only on .NET 3.5 or above. Since the agent supports both the old and new driver, we had to include the new driver in a sub-directory of the agent installation. So the new installer includes that, as well as a new updater which can handle updating that sub-directory.
*nix agent update
The *nix agent 1.10.3 is also now available and includes a number of bug fixes including some major updates for FreeBSD to improve how we collect metrics and fix some problems. See the agent release notes for details.
Search
You can now quickly switch between servers using the search icon in the main navigation menu. Whilst you could click it and start typing, the faster option is to use the Shift + / keyboard shortcut!
Awesome stuff guys! Keep up the great work :)