Linux Server Monitoring and Self-healing System Using Nagios

Abstract

In an administrator perspective, a system repair is a tedious work because a server can be down any time, even at night. In addition, it takes some time to repair and bring the server back online. Therefore, a self-healing server is needed to decrease workload of an administrator. Nagios is open source monitoring tools and is normally used for monitoring networks, servers or applications. In this work, a self-healing function in Nagios is proposed in order to automatically solve Linux server problems. Nagios is used for both monitoring and solving problems in Apache web servers and Oracle database servers, which were analyzed using a root cause analysis. Two scenarios, a practical scenario and a simulated problem scenario, are tested with number of corrections and time to solve problems as performance metrics. The experimental results showed that the time to solve problems using self-healing approach for Apache web servers was improved 31.42% and that for Oracle database servers was improved 40.40% comparing with manual solving approach.