Monitoring System

The monitoring system used by RightScale is based on two open source projects: collectd (http://collectd.org) and RRDtool (http://rrdtool.org). In addition, a custom viewer is used to display monitoring graphs on the web site.  See List of Monitored Metrics.

NOTE: The monitoring features are only available for Premium accounts.  If you have a Developer account, you will need to upgrade in order to unlock the Monitoring utility.  Contact sales@rightscale.com.

• Alert System
• List of Monitored Metrics
• Setting up collectd
• Writing Custom collect plugins

The overall process of RightScale's monitoring system is as follows:

• Collectd is installed on an instance at boot time using the SYS Monitoring install RightScript.
• The web site passes the hostname of the monitoring server to the instance using the EC2 launch data (ex: RS_sketchy=skethcy1-1.rightscale.com)
• Collectd auto-detects data sources (disks, processes, etc), starts collecting data, and sends the data every 20 seconds via UDP to the specified monitoring server.
• The monitoring server stores the data in an RRD database.
• When a user browses to the server's monitoring tab on the web site, the request is proxied through to the monitoring server.
• The monitoring server produces graphs using the data in the RRD database.