Monitoring Apache with LARRD and Big Brother

May 25, 2007 · 2 min read

I managed to figure out how to monitor Apache with Big Brother and LARRD. As it's not very well documented I thought I'd share it with everyone.

First set your apache server to display status in the apache httpd.conf:

<Location /server-status>
SetHandler server-status
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Location>  

ExtendedStatus On

Setting extended status to On does slow down the server a little bit, but it's usually not noticeable. Remember to limit access to the status page to just the IP where your Big Brother server is monitoring from.

Add apache to @DATALIST in larrd-config.pl

Then in your apache-larrd.pl (under the larrd directory) you'll need to hardcode the servers you want to monitor.

%host_h = (
    ‘server01’ => {
        port => “80”,
        url => “http://www.yoursite.com/server-status?auto”,
    }
);

The first part of the host_h array is to identify which server to attach the RRD file with. In this instance I'm monitoring a server called server01 and the website I have setup with the server-status page is http://www.youresite.com/server-status?auto. If your host is a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) then you can omit the full url and just have /server-status?auto and Big Brother will work out the URL.

With any luck you'll have 4 new graphs on your trends/LARRD page.