Ubuntu service monitoring like "monit" - do you use it?

Question

What are your thoughts on using any kind of service monitoring to auto restart services that failed?
Is monit a good solution?

Answer 1

Well, I think in general monitoring is an extremely good idea. Auto-restart, however, needs to be implemented carefully. Depending on your application, there are likely services that need to be started up in a certain order. This logic needs to be built into your auto-restart routines so that things come up and get shut down in a healthy state. Also, included in your logic needs to be some limit on the number of times it will try and restart a service in a certain time period. If something makes a service fail in such a way that manual intervention is required, you don't want monit to be constantly trying to restart things every 10 seconds.

All in all, whether or not this is a good idea depends completely on your requirements and your environment.