Introducing Monitoring

Over the lifecycle of your application, knowing when and why an issue in production occurs is critical. At DigitalOcean, we understand this and want to enable developers to make informed decisions about scaling their infrastructure. That’s why we are excited to announce our new Monitoring service, available today for free with all Droplets. It gives you the tools to resolve issues quickly by alerting you when one occurs and giving you the information you need to understand it.

Monitoring the applications you’ve deployed should be as simple and intuitive as the rest of the DigitalOcean experience. Earlier this year, we released an open source agent and improved graphs that give you a better picture of the health of your Droplets. That was just the first piece of the puzzle. The agent offers greater visibility into your infrastructure, and now Monitoring will let you know when to act on that information.

Monitoring is natively integrated with the DigitalOcean platform and can be enabled at no extra cost by simply checking a box when creating your Droplets. It introduces new alerting capabilities using the metrics collected by the agent, allowing your team to receive email or Slack notifications based on the resource utilization and operational health of your Droplets.

View Graphs & Statistics

The Monitoring service exposes system metrics and provides an overview of your Droplets’ health. The metrics are collected at one-minute intervals and the data is retained for a month, enabling you to view both up-to-the-minute and historical data. The improved Droplet graphs allow you to visualize how your instances are performing over time.

The following metrics are currently available:

• CPU
• Disk I/O
• Memory
• Disk usage
• Inbound and outbound bandwidth
• A process list ordered by CPU or memory usage

Create Alert Policies

You can create alert policies on any of your metrics to receive notifications when the metric crosses your specified threshold. An alert policy monitors a single metric over a time period you specify. Alerts are triggered when the state is above or below your threshold for the specified time period. You can leverage DigitalOcean tags to group your Droplets based on your project or environment. Then you can apply the alert policy to specific Droplets or groups of tagged Droplets.

Alert policies can be created from the Monitoring tab in the DigitalOcean control panel:

You can find more information about creating alert policies in this tutorial on the DigitalOcean Community site.

Configure Notifications

When you set up an alert policy, you will be able to choose between two notification methods:

• Slack Alerts — Post to your team’s Slack channel when a new alert is triggered.
• Email Notifications — Send emails when a new alert alert is triggered.

You’ll receive notifications both when an alert threshold has been exceeded and when the issue has been resolved.

Getting Started

To enable Monitoring on your Droplets, you’ll need to have the agent installed. On new Droplets, it’s as simple as clicking the Monitoring checkbox during Droplet creation.

On existing Droplets, you can install the agent by running:

curl -sSL https://agent.digitalocean.com/install.sh | sh

Find more information on the agent itself in this tutorial on the DigitalOcean Community site.

Coming Soon

With the first iteration of our Monitoring service out the door, we’re already working on what’s next. Some features you will see soon include:

• API support for alert policies
• Enhanced visualization of alerts
• Monitoring for Block Storage
• Webhooks to notify external services about alerts

From alerting on issues to visualizing metrics, we want to provide you with the tools you need to monitor the health and performance of your applications in production. We’d love to hear your feedback. What metrics are important for your team? How can we help integrate Monitoring into your workflow? Let us know in the comments or submit a suggestion on our UserVoice page.