I use Zabbix to monitor my servers. It works by having a central zabbix server make calls to zabbix-agent processes on the monitored servers. The zabbix-agent can invoke a user-created script on the server and return whatever one-line output the script provides.
I needed a quick script to check the server to see if a set of database records exist, matching a given set of conditions. In this case, I'm checking to see if some log data representing yesterday's web traffic has been imported correctly, on the monitored server.
To start with, I used something like this;
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = 'production'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/environment'
day = 1.day.ago.to_date
hostname = `hostname`.chomp
puts LogEntry.all(:conditions => {:day => day, :hostname => hostname}, :limit => 1).size
There could be a whole lot of log_entries records for yesterday, for this hostname. All I really want is to confirm that the importer script ran OK, so checking for the existence of one record that matches these criteria is sufficient and much faster than doing an aggregate query like a count.
This script outputs a '1' if everything is OK, and a '0' if not.
Hooking up a zabbix agent check to the script is easy enough, but whenever the server tries to call it, the check times out. The problem is that loading the entire Rails stack takes too long. Besides, it's overkill when all I want to do is run a single database query.
So, with help from here I changed it to this;
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
RAILS_ROOT = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/..'
require 'rubygems'
require RAILS_ROOT + '/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record'
yaml_file = RAILS_ROOT + '/config/database.yml'
db = YAML::load(File.read(yaml_file))['production']
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(db)
class LogEntry < ActiveRecord::Base; end
hostname = `hostname`.chomp
yesterday = 1.day.ago.to_date
puts LogEntry.all(:conditions => {:day => day, :hostname => hostname}, :limit => 1).size
If you've got Rails installed as a gem on your server, you don't need to jump through all the 'RAILS_ROOT' hoops. But, I vendor everything, so I need to tell ruby where to find active_record.
Now the script is fast enough to respond to zabbix checks. If I needed it to be even faster, I could use lower-level ruby database code. But, this is quick enough, and importing ActiveRecord gives us the "1.day.ago" stuff too, keeping the code clean.
