Memcached monitoring/statistics tool

[Jozef Sevcik]

Hi all,

maybe I'm just blind, but is there any tool (free or commercial) for monitoring memcached statistics ?
Required features:
- support for multiple servers
- real-time and history statistics (tool downloading statistics in predefined intervals)
- graphs
- reports (optional)

The only two things I've found are memcache.php and statsproxy, but if I understand correctly, both are only for real-time use.

Thanks

--
Jozef

[Joseph Engo]

I would recommend Cacti + these templates:

http://dealnews.com/developers/cacti/memcached.html

Not true real time, but you wouldn't want to hit your memcache servers
that often for stats in production.

[bdeshong]

Hey Jozef,

This may be a bit premature on my part, but I'm currently working on a
Mac OS X-based GUI client for monitoring Memcached stats.

There's really not a strong need for this in the world, but I'm using
it as an exercise to build a Mac desktop-based app.

In general, I'm planning to release it as open source, probably
sometime by this summer.

Hope that helps?

Brian

[Jozef Sevcik]

Joseph, Brian, thanks for responses.
Maybe 'real time' was not right word, I was thinking about like combination of 'memcache.php' (show me stats now, on request) + scheduled monitoring in background (every X minutes for example).
I'll check Cacti, thanks.
Brian, that sounds good, announcing it here in mailing list then would be fantastic ;)

"There's really not a strong need for this in the world"

I just guess how 'big players' with hundreds or thousands of memcached instances do this.
Do they all use Cacti+memcached templates or do they all have some custom tool ?..

Thanks
Jozef

2009/3/30 Joseph Engo <dev.t...@gmail.com>

--
Jozef

[Joseph Engo]

Well, we only have 8 memcache servers here but even then we don't actively watch the graphs.  We use Nagois to make sure they are active and it will alert us if one dies off.   Beyond that we glance over Cacti to check out usage and hit rates but thats really it.

[Josh Snyder]

We have sizeable number of memcache instances running. We have some
simple Nagios alerts mainly checking for reachability and a handful of
Cacti graphs. However, in practice, memcached is extremely stable, so
we only get alerts when we've screwed something up, and the Cacti
graphs see pretty light usage. I wouldn't go nuts on worrying about
monitoring your memcache servers beyond the basics until you have a
solid sense for what your needs are; I would focus instead on
carefully monitoring your clients.

-josh

[Les Mikesell]

Josh Snyder wrote:
> We have sizeable number of memcache instances running. We have some
> simple Nagios alerts mainly checking for reachability and a handful of
> Cacti graphs. However, in practice, memcached is extremely stable, so
> we only get alerts when we've screwed something up, and the Cacti
> graphs see pretty light usage. I wouldn't go nuts on worrying about
> monitoring your memcache servers beyond the basics until you have a
> solid sense for what your needs are; I would focus instead on
> carefully monitoring your clients.

Does anyone deploy spare machines with some way to pick up the IP
addresses of any that fail, or do you just make them all active and let
the client re-balancing take care of any problems?

--
Les Mikesell
lesmi...@gmail.com

[nbin...@gear6.com]

Jozef,

Cacti is a popular open-source monitoring and graphing solution that
uses PHP and rrdtool. It can graph pretty much anything including
memcache via the templates posted by Joseph.
http://www.cacti.net/ (if you haven't already found it)

Those memcache templates for cacti will also work when pointed at the
statsproxy instead of the memcache instance. A benefit to using the
statsproxy is that it asks the memcache service for stats once (per
configured time interval) and then can hand it out multiple times to
multiple machines instead of your actual service handling those
requests along with it's regular sets/gets.

To get them to work together you'd have to either modify the templates
to use port 8080 or change the statsproxy config to use port 11211
(assuming your memcache server is either on a different port or IP).
Instructions for modifying the templates are in the link above.

I'm currently working on some templates and scripts for Cacti that
will be more plug-n-play for monitoring memcache via statsproxy.

One thing to note with Cacti is that it is configured by default to
poll for new information on a 5 minute interval. This may or may-not
provide you with enough granularity in your graphs, if it doesn't, it
can be configured all the way down to 10 seconds in the Cacti config.

-Nic

On Mar 30, 12:17 pm, Jozef Sevcik <sev...@styxys.com> wrote:
> Joseph, Brian, thanks for responses.
> Maybe 'real time' was not right word, I was thinking about like combination
> of 'memcache.php' (show me stats now, on request) + scheduled monitoring in
> background (every X minutes for example).
> I'll check Cacti, thanks.
> Brian, that sounds good, announcing it here in mailing list then would be
> fantastic ;)
>
> "There's really not a strong need for this in the world"
> I just guess how 'big players' with hundreds or thousands of memcached
> instances do this.
> Do they all use Cacti+memcached templates or do they all have some custom
> tool ?..
>
> Thanks
> Jozef
>

> 2009/3/30 Joseph Engo <dev.toas...@gmail.com>

[Jozef Sevcik]

All,

thanks for comprehensive answers. Cacti seems to be way to go.

Thank you
Jozef

2009/3/31 nbin...@gear6.com <nbin...@gear6.com>

--
Jozef