Linux Server Health Monitoring

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The Wormly Linux Server Health Agent is a small PHP script, which is periodically called by the Wormly service via HTTP. During each request, it collects various server performance metrics and returns that information for processing by Wormly.

Currently, the agent is available for all Linux-based servers that support PHP. This includes VPS and shared hosting environments.

We chose this approach instead of the daemon / service approach used by some of our competitors for a number of reasons:

Simplicity. The PHP script is less than 100 lines of code and performs a very simple function. As a consequence there are drastically fewer potential points of failure from erroneous code.

Installation and upgrades become trivial tasks – simply download the agent to an appropriate location on your web server. It's a single file, entirely self-contained.

Security. Provided as source code, anyone with even basic scripting knowledge can examine the code to satisfy themselves that server integrity will not be compromised by its use.

Queries to the agent are authenticated with a 1024-bit key. However even if the key were compromised, the attacker would merely be able to observe various innocuous performance metrics. No other functionality is included in the agent.

Compatibility. PHP is available on well over a million web servers world-wide, so the vast majority of Wormly customers can use the agent without any extra configuration requirements.

Performance. No processing of any sort takes place on your server – all processing is done within our infrastructure. This means that the agent has negligible CPU and RAM requirements.

See Also

• Server Health Monitoring
• Application Monitor - Web Edition - Datasheet