Apart from performance monitoring with legacy or Akamai Cloud Pulse solutions, consider the following recommendations on availability and logs that will help you keep your Linode in good condition.

Availability monitoring

The availability of your servers, and the websites and web applications you host on them, can be critically important. If you generate income from a blog or charge subscription fees for your web application, downtime can have a severe impact on your bottom line. Using an availability monitoring tool can help you rapidly detect and resolve service disruptions, thereby mitigating the impact on your websites and web applications.

Assess your needs

Not everyone needs to monitor the availability of their server. For example, if you use your Linode to host a personal picture gallery website for friends and family, the occasional service interruption probably won't bother you. The small inconvenience of your website going offline for a few minutes doesn't justify the time it would take to set up and configure an availability monitoring tool.

If you depend on your website or web application for your livelihood, an availability monitoring tool is practically a necessity. Once set up, the tool actively watches your servers and services and alerts you when they're unavailable. You'll be able to troubleshoot the problem and restore service as quickly as possible.

Whether you use one Linode or dozens of them, mission-critical servers and services should be watched by an independent monitoring tool that can keep tabs on their availability. The tool should have an automated method of detecting service-related incidents and be able to notify you via email, text message, or SMS. That way you'll know that a server or service is down within minutes of it having failed.

Find the right tool

There are several different availability monitoring tools available. Your decision should be based on how many servers you'll be monitoring:

• Multiple Servers: If you run more than one server, the Elastic Stack is an excellent monitoring tool.
• Single Server: If you only run a single server, you might want to use a third-party service to monitor your Linode. You could also use a network diagnostic tool like MTR to diagnose and isolate networking errors.
• Linode Managed: The Linode Managed service lets us manage your infrastructure and provides incident response around the clock.

Configure shutdown watchdog (lassie)

Shutdown Watchdog, also known as Lassie, is a Cloud Manager feature capable of automatically rebooting your Linode if it powers off unexpectedly. Lassie is not technically an availability monitoring tool, but it can help get your Linode back online fast if it's accidentally powered off.

To turn Lassie on and off, see the Recover from unexpected shutdowns with Lassie guide. Once Lassie is enabled, your Linode will automatically reboot if it is unexpectedly powered off in the future.

Linode Managed

Linode Managed is our monitoring service that offers 24x7 incident response, dashboard metrics for your Linodes, free cPanel, and an automatic backup service. If you are running more than one Linode, not all are required to be managed. You can establish separate accounts (e.g., production and development) and monitor only the most critical services running on designated Linode(s). Existing customers can sign up for Linode Managed by contacting Support.

Manage logs

Server logs record important events that occur on your system, like login attempts or service restarts. You can review these logs to troubleshoot errors, track usage, or investigate unusual behavior.

Akamai Cloud Pulse logs

Akamai Cloud Pulse automatically captures audit events for control plane operations across supported Akamai Cloud services. See Linodes audit logs for information on what events are captured for Linodes and how to view and access the log data.

Rotate logs

Over time, server log files grow and can consume a massive amount of disk space. To prevent this, you can use logrotate, a utility that automatically creates new logs, archives and compresses current ones at set intervals, and deletes the oldest files after a specified period.

Use the logrotate guide to get started.

Monitor system logs

Monitoring system logs is important, but scanning hundreds of lines manually is tedious. Instead of opening files, you can use Logwatch, a customizable tool that automatically analyzes your system logs and emails you clear, detailed reports of the most important events.

Use the Logwatch guide to get started.