Monitoring Gearman Servers with Site24x7 Plugin

Get performance metrics such as queued and running tasks to identify any server slowdown or failure on your Gearman job servers.

Efficient monitoring of your Gearman cluster is essential as a bottleneck can have a direct influence on the functioning of the job servers involved. Gearman monitoring helps to keep a check on how the distributed processes communicate and view all the critical metrics in a single, intuitive dashboard.

This document details how to configure the Gearmand server plugin and the monitoring metrics for providing in-depth visibility into the performance, availability, and usage stats of Gearmand servers.

Gearman server monitoring metrics:

Site24x7 plugins offer insightful visualizations and timely alerts to ensure continued functioning of your Gearman job server (also known as Gearmand).

Various out-of-the-box metrics we support are:

Number of running jobs

The running metric shows how many jobs are currently running

Number of queued jobs

The queued metric shows the number of jobs in queue waiting to be completed

Response time

After the job server finds a suitable worker, the worker performs the work requested by the client and sends a response to the client through the job server. The time involved in this process is calculated by the response_time metric

Number of unique tasks

The unique_tasks is the total number of identical functions registered with the Gearman server

Number of workers

The workers metric shows the maximum possible count of workers that could be doing this job

How it works?

  • Log-in to your Site24x7 account. Sign up here if you don't have one
  • Download and install the latest version of Site24x7 Linux agent or the Windows agent
  • Install the Gearman plugin extension
  • The agent will execute the Gearman plugin and push the data to the Site24x7 server

Prerequisites:

  • Site24X7 Gearman plugin uses Python's "Gearman" package to collect metrics
    sudo pip install gearman
    or
    sudo easy_install gearman

Gearman plugin installation:

For Linux:

  • Create a directory with the name "gearmanmon", under Site24x7 Linux agent plugin directory - /opt/site24x7/monagent/plugins/
    sudo mkdir gearmanmon
  • Download the gearmanmon.py from our GitHub repository and place it under the "gearmanmon" directory
    sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/site24x7/plugins/master/gearmanmon/gearmanmon.py
  • The default python path given in the plugin script is #!/usr/bin/python. If you wish to provide an alternate python path, replace the existing one preceded by the shebang character "#!".
  • Change the values of host and port to match your configuration
  • The server agent will report stats on the performance of Gearman under the Plugins tab in the Site24x7 web client. In case the plugin is not listed in the Site24x7 web client, restart the agent.
    sudo /etc/init.d/site24x7monagent restart

For Windows:

  • Create a directory with the name "gearmanmon", under Site24x7 Windows agent plugin directory - C:\Program Files\Site24x7\WinAgent\monitoring\Plugins\
  • Download gearmanmon.py from our GitHub repository and place it under the "gearmanmon" directory
  • Download gearmanmon.ps1 and place it under "gearmanmon" directory
  • Replace the existing python path in $python="C:\Python27\python.exe" with your path in the "gearmanmon.ps1" file
  • The Site24x7 Windows agent will now report stats on the performance of the Gearman server under the Plugins tab in the Site24x7 web client

Monitoring additional metrics:

  • To monitor additional metrics, edit the "gearmanmon.py" file and add the new metrics that need monitoring
  • Increment the plugin version value in the file to view the newly added metrics (For e.g., change the default plugin version from PLUGIN_VERSION = "1" to "PLUGIN_VERSION = "2")

Related plugins:

  • Redis plugin - Monitor performance metrics of your Redis databases
  • MongoDB plugin - Monitor performance metrics of your MongoDB databases
  • Memcached plugin - Analyze performance of your Memcached server
  • Nagios plugin - Execute thousands of Nagios plugins in Site24x7 without the need of running a Nagios server
  • Out-of-the-box plugins - Monitor your entire app stack with our extensive list of integrations
  • Create custom plugins - Create custom Linux and Windows plugins and monitor custom attributes

Troubleshooting tips: