Munin Graphs for Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails)

Munin Graphs for Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails)

The goal of this article is to get fairly nice looking graphs of Phusion Passenger’s performance and memory metrics:

This specific setup focuses on CentOS (on cPanel none the less) – but instructions should apply for most linux distros. It assumes you already have Passenger and Munin successfully setup. See my previous article on getting Phusion Passenger setup if you have not already.

First we need to allow the munin user sudo privileges for a few passenger related commands:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/visudo
 
# Add the following line to the file
munin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/passenger-status, /usr/bin/passenger-memory-stats
 
# Depending on your setup, you may also have to comment out the following line:
Defaults requiretty

If you see the error sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo in /var/log/munin/munin-node.log, comment out the final line shown above.

The following two files will glean some performance and memory statistics.

Passenger Status:

sudo vi /usr/share/munin/plugins/passenger_status

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
def output_config
  puts <<-END
graph_category App
graph_title passenger status
graph_vlabel count
 
sessions.label sessions
max.label max processes
running.label running processes
active.label active processes
END
  exit 0
end
 
def output_values
  status = `sudo /usr/bin/passenger-status`
  unless $?.success?
    $stderr.puts "failed executing passenger-status"
    exit 1
  end
  status =~ /max\s+=\s+(\d+)/
  puts "max.value #{$1}"
 
  status =~ /count\s+=\s+(\d+)/
  puts "running.value #{$1}"
 
  status =~ /active\s+=\s+(\d+)/
  puts "active.value #{$1}"
 
  total_sessions = 0
  status.scan(/Sessions: (\d+)/).flatten.each { |count| total_sessions += count.to_i }
  puts "sessions.value #{total_sessions}"
end
 
if ARGV[0] == "config"
  output_config
else
  output_values
end

Memory Stats:

sudo vi /usr/share/munin/plugins/passenger_memory_status

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# put in /etc/munin/plugins and restart munin-node
# by Dan Manges, http://www.dcmanges.com/blog/rails-application-visualization-with-munin
# NOTE: you might need to add munin to allow passwordless sudo for passenger-memory-stats
 
def output_config
  puts <<-END
graph_category App
graph_title Passenger memory stats
graph_vlabel count
 
memory.label memory
END
  exit 0
end
 
def output_values
  status = `sudo /usr/bin/passenger-memory-stats | tail -1`
  unless $?.success?
    $stderr.puts "failed executing passenger-memory-stats"
    exit 1
  end
  status =~ /(\d+\.\d+)/
  puts "memory.value #{$1}"
end
 
if ARGV[0] == "config"
  output_config
else
  output_values
end

Now we will link these to the active plugins, and make them executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/share/munin/plugins/passenger_status
sudo chmod +x /usr/share/munin/plugins/passenger_memory_status
sudo ln -s /usr/share/munin/plugins/passenger_status /etc/munin/plugins/passenger_status
sudo ln -s /usr/share/munin/plugins/passenger_memory_status /etc/munin/plugins/passenger_memory_status

Last thing we need to do is make sure those scripts run as the munin user:

sudo vi /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node

[passenger_*]
user munin
command ruby %c

Restart the munin node, and wait and you should see the graphs start to propagate.

sudo /etc/init.d/munin-node restart

For even more detailed performance analytics, checkout NewRelic monitoring. And thanks to Dan Mange for the munin scripts.