Monit for Debian
================

Contribution
------------

Monit upstream uses Canonical-like CLA, that permit them to relicense a
contribution under a proprietary license and do proprietary derivative works.
That makes the current GPL license of the project to be a farce.

Please consider contribiting patches to the Debian's monit package instead
under any DFSG-compatible license.

Configuration
-------------

Hope you'll like monit configuration snippets found in
/etc/monit/conf-available/.  Generally we try to provide them
working out-of-box but it's not always feasible.

These are supposed to be reviewed accordingly to site configuration
and policy including own file permissions (defaults to 0644, configuration
snippets *are* readable by anyone), IP addresses, host names, exact limit
values, etc.  Then you could enable some snippets by symlinking them
to the /etc/monit/conf-enabled/ directory.

Please do post bugs against monit package when you have to change any
snippet in the way that should be current default (e.g. a binary path
has changed in the package).

Packagers may drop the default monit config file to:
/etc/monit/conf-available/<package>
and alternative/optional snippets to:
/etc/monit/conf-available/<package>-<somename>


Monitoring of deb packages
--------------------------

If you monitor debian packages, you should consider adding the
following snippet to your /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50monit configuration to
stop monit during a apt upgrade and start it again once apt
finishes. This avoid spurious monit restarts/alerts of services that
are stopped/started as part of their debian package postinst.

 --8<--
  DPkg::Pre-Invoke { "[ -x /usr/bin/monit ] && /etc/init.d/monit stop" };
  DPkg::Post-Invoke { "[ -x /usr/bin/monit ] && /etc/init.d/monit start" };
 --8<--

See also man 5 apt.conf.


Startup delay
-------------

For some slow-to-start processes monit can, especially at bootup,
start to monitor a process before it is fully initialised.  This can
cause monit to erroneously attempt a restart.

To avoid this, you should set the "start delay" option in monitrc.  A
typical example looks like this:

 --8<--
  set daemon 120
    with start delay 240
 --8<--


Using with Systemd
------------------

In principle, you can use this piece of ... code with Monit.  But using
sysvinit is recommended.  Keep in mind that the default systemd's
configuration of many packages in the Debian will conflict with the Monit.
For example, the ssh.service uses the Restart directive like this:

 --8<--
 Restart=on-failure
 --8<--

This configuration will break any proactive actions from
the Monit (see example configuration snippet for openssh-server in
/etc/monit/conf-available/openssh-server).