godhead

h1. Godhead: Recipes for Monitoring with God

Godhead lets you configure God monitoring tasks to separate configuration of the program being monitored from configuration of the specific project it's used in.

It also contains a collection of starting recipes gathered from around the web:

• Nginx
• Mongrel
• Thin
• Unicorn
• Beanstalkd
• Starling
• Memcached
• Tokyo Tyrant
• Generic worker daemons

There's skeleton files for delayed_job, workling

h2. Dependencies

Requires the gems for active_support and, of course, god. Optionally requires tlsmail (for Gmail or other secure email notification).

If you enjoy godhead you may also wish to find "Jesus,":http://github.com/dmathieu/jesus the "web interface for god to speak with mankind". Allelujah.

h2. Examples

The @examples/@ directory holds:

• a script to run god as a service.
  ** @sudo cp [GODHEAD]/examples/etc/init.d/god /etc/init.d/god@
  ** @sudo chmod a+x /etc/init.d/god@
  ** @update-rc.d god defaults@
• a god.conf that loads God, sets up notifications, and then runs all .god files in /etc/god
• an example project script to put into /etc/god

h2. Our use case for godhead

At infochimps, we have a lot of boxen set up as "scrapers":http://github.com/infochimps/monkeyshines and as "feed endpoints.":http://github.com/mrflip/flood_monkey These typically talk to a lightweight database of some sort, pull or push to a queue, and are controlled through a simple sinatra admin panel.

With Godhead we describe the platonic form of, say, a "god config to monitor Tokyo Tyrant". The god files for a project using Tokyo Tyrant specifies only those few ways (port numbers, memory limits, etc) that its tasks differ from any other project's Tokyo Tyrant tasks. Configuration is still done in Ruby, through any combination of config params and subclassing.

h2. Links

• "God Monitoring homepage":http://god.rubyforge.org/
• "Railscast with God monitoring Workling and Starling":http://railscasts.com/episodes/130-monitoring-with-god
• "beanstalkd"
  ** "article by topfunky":http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-beanstalk-messaging-queue
  ** "god recipe":http://pastie.textmate.org/private/ovgxu2ihoicli2ktrwtbew
• "delayed_job":http://github.com/blog/229-dj-god
• "init.d/god script":http://www.johnwulff.com/2008/04/30/deploy-typo-using-capistrano
• backgroundRb: "this one":http://effectif.com/articles/monitoring-backgroundrb-with-god - or "this one":http://blog.jonathanrwallace.com/2008/08/monitoring-backgroundrb-workers-with-god/