AWS Monit – The Monitoring Tool

January 8, 2021 / Nirav Shah

Monit is a small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix based systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in the situation of an error.

Monit has built-in a lightweight HTTP(S) interface you can use to browse the Monit server and check the status of all monitored services. From the web interface, you can start, stop and restart processes and disable or enable monitoring of services.

Updating System Packages

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 1: Install Monit

sudo apt install monit

Step 2: Start Monit Daemon

sudo monit

Step 3: Check Monit Status

sudo systemctl status monit

Step 4: Configuring Monit

sudo nano /etc/monit/monitrc

By default, the Monit check the services at an interval of 30 seconds as shown in the screenshot below. It can be changed by the below command.

set daemon  120

Monit provides a web interface for monitoring and managing the configured services. By default, Monit listens on port 2812.

sudo nano /etc/monit/monitrc

set httpd port 2812
use address 12.34.56.78  #replace 12.34.56.78 with your server's IP
allow localhost        
allow admin:monit

Ensure to save the file before closing.

Note: The username is admin and the password is monit. You can change its username and password if you want.

Reload the monit,

sudo systemctl restart monit

Next, enable Monit to start-up automatically on boot with the command below.

sudo systemctl enable monit

Open port 2812 in the security group for the incoming and outgoing traffic. You can visit your domain or server IP on port 2812