Monitor Rackspace Cloud Server from OpenShift PaaS with rxalarm

Yes! You can actually monitor, set alarm for your Rackspace Cloud Server from free OpenShift PaaS with a great project named rxalarm. OpenShift PaaS and OpenStack IaaS. As a practical statement, a good read will be – Cloud Computing Service Models for those who can not understand the difference between PaaS and IaaS. We can run OpenShift instance of our own (not hosted by Red Hat) on Rackspace Cloud Servers, as actually we will use kind of first generation Software Defined Data Center – load balancers, CDN, database as a service based on OpenStack, we will be running OpenShift as a Software on OpenStack.

Obviously, reverse is not possible. Most of us who uses Rackspace Cloud Server uses many services, it is not actually only one server, on the Rackspace Cloud Account you will get quite nice Cloud Monitoring tools, they are great for monitoring but has some cost. Actually, you are using other resources of Rackspace Cloud to monitor! How you can monitor your own server from that server. That is the basic reason to have some charge. But, OpenStack is Open Source, so the API references are available. As OpenShift PaaS has a free tier of usage, we can set an alarm system by using WebHook for Rackspace Cloud Monitoring.

There are lot of ways the alarm system can be set. Tools like Pingdom are very much crude and practically they fail to detect if load balancers are throwing errors due to problem with memcached. mem cash dee is the pronunciation. Dee is for demon. Never run memcached on the same server with Varnish cache.  The reason is Guru Meditation error!

 

How to Monitor Rackspace Cloud Server from OpenShift PaaS with rxalarm

 

Theoretically it is quite difficult to use unless you are used with API. But this tool :

 

 

Actually the person is quite knowledgeable. At a glance I suspected him as a Racker for quality of logics plus OpenStack stuffs. It worths to bookmark his blog. His name Nick Bettison and actually it is OpenShift who featured his this work on Developer Spotlight. If you love to read our website’s abnormal, never heard tricks, you’ll definitely like his too :

 

 

Another website I found useful is :

 

 

As Google, Microsoft etcetera companies are now known thieves (like known hosts!), use Piwik Analytics. Anyway, back to the topic, how to install rxalarm. First part of setup for Rackspace Cloud Server is written on Rackspace official guides. Rest is written on the Github repo.

The interface is quite pathetic to look when compared with new look of Rackspace Database monitoring tool, but the fact is – one person developed a full project which no one ever thought of, for free without any hope of return definitely deserves some kudos.