Wednesday, 24 January 2018

Monit: Monitoring your Services

Bioinformatics Applications are moving more in the direction of "Microservices" Architectures where services should be fine-grained and the protocols should be lightweight. Microservices Architectures decomposed the application into different smaller services improving the modularity; making the application easier to develop, deploy and maintain. It also parallelizes development by enabling small autonomous teams to develop, deploy and scale their respective services independently.



With more services (Databases, APIs, Web Applications, Pipelines) more components should be trace, monitor, to know the health of your application. There might be different roles that are played by different services (in different physical/logical machines) that can be even geographically isolated from each other. As a whole, these services/servers might be providing a combined service to the end application. A particular issue or problem on any of the server should not affect the final application behavior and must be found and fixed before the outage happens.

Multiple applications allow developers/devops and sysadmins to monitor all the services in a microservices application, but the most popular ones are Nagios and Monit.