Knowledge Base
Accounts
Billing and payments
Cloud server volumes
Cloud servers
Cloud storage
Customer portal
Data centers and network
Data privacy and data portability
Dedicated servers
Firewall
How it works
Kubernetes clusters
L2 segments
Linux administration
Load balancing
Support
VPN to GPN
Windows administration
Embargoed and Sanctioned Countries
Using Monit process monitoring on Ubuntu/Debian
Monit is an open source monitoring tool for Linux operating systems. This utility allows to:
- manage and monitor processes, programs, files, directories and file systems, log changes in files size, directories content, and checksums.
- get information about the status of each process that is monitored, and about the resources that the operating system allocates for these processes;
- stop resource-intensive processes, restart the services that stop responding and start the stopped services.
This article will guide you through basic Monit setup on Ubuntu/Debian operating systems.
Monit is available in Ubuntu and Debian repositories, so you don't need to setup additional repositories.
Run the following commands to install Monit:
Run the following commands to start the service and view its status:
The output should look like follows:
Use the following command to enable the service autostart on boot:
Now the installation is completed.
The default configuration file is “/etc/monit/monitrc”. You can edit it with "vi" or any other text editor:
Use the following command to specify Monit's poll cycle length and run Monit in daemon mode. You must specify a numeric argument which is a polling interval in seconds. In daemon mode, Monit detaches from the console, puts itself in the background and runs continuously, monitoring each specified service and then goes to sleep for the given poll interval, wakes up and start monitoring again in an endless cycle.
Set the mail server and recipient address for notifications:
You can enable web interface and use it to view reports. By default, Monit is setup on port 2812.
To enable web interface, find the following lines in the configuration file:
Uncomment the following lines:
In the example above, the username is set to 'admin', and the password is set to 'monit'.
You need to restart the service so that changes take effect:
Now you can log in to http://[YOUR-IP-ADDRESS]:2812 using admin:monit as credentials.


A number of monitoring templates come with Monit. You can list them using "$ sudo ls -al /etc/monit/conf-available/" command.
You need to create a symbolic link in the "/etc/monit/conf-enabled/" to the template you want to enable. For example:
Or you can create a custom template in the "/etc/monit/conf-available/" directory, and create a link to it in the "/etc/monit/conf-enabled/":
Restart the service so that changes take effect:
Let's stop the service which is being monitored by Monit:
You should get an email notification about the service has been stopped. In 120 seconds Monit will try to restart the service.
The log file is "/var/log/monit.log":
For more information on using Monit, please refer to the official documentation.