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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Monit vs runit

Monit vs runit

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Monit
Monit
Stacks166
Followers54
Votes0
runit
runit
Stacks4
Followers10
Votes0

Monit vs runit: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Monit and runit are two popular process supervision systems in the Unix/Linux world. Both have their unique features and advantages, which cater to different needs of system administrators.

1. Dependency on external services: Monit can monitor and manage external services such as Apache, MySQL, and more, while runit focuses solely on managing local system services, making it lightweight and efficient for local process supervision.

2. Configuration syntax: Monit uses a declarative configuration syntax, allowing users to specify the desired state of processes, while runit relies on a simpler, more straightforward configuration file format, which can be easier to manage for some users.

3. Init system integration: Runit can act as an init system, handling the boot process and managing system services, providing a more streamlined approach, whereas Monit is primarily focused on monitoring and managing individual processes without involvement in system initialization.

4. Logging capabilities: Monit provides extensive logging capabilities, allowing users to track and analyze process events effectively, while runit has more limited logging options, which may be sufficient for basic supervision needs but lack advanced monitoring features.

5. Resource usage: Runit is known for its minimal resource usage, making it suitable for systems with low resources or embedded devices, while Monit, although efficient, may consume slightly more resources due to its broader range of features and functionality.

6. Customization options: Monit offers a wide range of customization options, allowing users to tailor the supervision process to their specific requirements, while runit, being more lightweight, may have fewer customization features but excels in simplicity and ease of use.

In Summary, Monit and runit differ in their handling of external services, configuration syntax, init system integration, logging capabilities, resource usage, and customization options, catering to varying needs of system administrators.

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Advice on Monit, runit

Shoaib
Shoaib

Dec 23, 2019

Needs advice

Hi, I have a simple script that dynamically spawns independent processes (through bash). Which tool should I use to monitor the spawned processes assuming I have the PIDs(/pid files) of the spawned processes? Monit seems to be useful for monitoring pre-configured processes but I need something for monitoring dynamic PID/PID files. Prometheus seems to be needing HTTP endpoints. A beginner

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Detailed Comparison

Monit
Monit
runit
runit

It can monitor and manage distributed computer systems, conduct automatic maintenance and repair and execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

It is a cross-platform Unix init scheme with service supervision, a replacement for sysvinit, and other init schemes. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, MacOSX, Solaris, and can easily be adapted to other Unix operating systems.

Responsive UI; Control Services Remotely; Services Monitoring modes
Cross-platform ;Service supervision;Easily be adapted to other Unix operating systems
Statistics
Stacks
166
Stacks
4
Followers
54
Followers
10
Votes
0
Votes
0
Integrations
Slack
Slack
FreeBSD
FreeBSD
HipChat
HipChat
Pushover
Pushover
Linux
Linux
FreeBSD
FreeBSD
Gentoo Linux
Gentoo Linux
macOS
macOS
Ubuntu
Ubuntu
OpenBSD
OpenBSD

What are some alternatives to Monit, runit?

Grafana

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Sidekiq

Sidekiq

Sidekiq uses threads to handle many jobs at the same time in the same process. It does not require Rails but will integrate tightly with Rails 3/4 to make background processing dead simple.

Kibana

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Nagios

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Beanstalkd

Beanstalkd

Beanstalks's interface is generic, but was originally designed for reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running time-consuming tasks asynchronously.

Zabbix

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

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