Basing more and more stuff on mcollective means relying more and more on one of its underlying components : the activeMQ middleware, and more precisely the stomp connector. I hit a weird bug a few days ago and realized that I was not functionnaly monitoring this part of the system. The port was bound and responded to connections, subscriptions were possible but messages didn’t pass through.So I wrote this little plugin that makes this possible : it creates a random string, sends it to a queue and then reads the queue to check if the result is the same.

I recently switched from puppet daemon to mcollective commander : it kicks the “stuck in outer space puppet daemon” feature out of the way and brings me nice features (as load control). To do so I deployed the puppetd agent over my boxes.

Quick post : installing a mongo server is good, monitoring it is better. I wrote a very basic check that ensure your mongo DB is healthy. Grab it on my github.