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Description:

apachemanager 2.2

The apache-manager package helps to collect monitoring metrics about the
Apache web server and kill worker processes that exceed resource thresholds.
It works by parsing the plain text and HTML status pages generated by Apache’s
mod_status module. It’s currently tested on cPython 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8
and PyPy. It was developed for and expects to be run on Linux systems.

Status
Installation
Usage

Command line

Contact
License

Status
On the one hand the apache-manager package was developed based on quite a few
years of experience interfacing with (and monitoring) the Apache web server
using the interfaces provided by Apache itself (mod_status) as well as the
Linux operating system interfaces (/proc).
On the other hand the Python package itself is quite new: it was developed
between June and September of 2015.
Then again, I’m religious about test coverage, so there’s that :-).
Despite the complete package being covered by automated tests I’m not (yet)
committing to backwards compatibility because I first want to run this package
in a production (like) environment for some time, to get a feeling for how
robust it is. I also need to evaluate how easy it is to integrate the current
solution into monitoring systems (that was a goal, but I don’t always achieve
my goals on the first attempt :-).

Installation
The apache-manager package is available on PyPI which means installation
should be as simple as:
$ pip install apache-manager
There’s actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per
user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing
system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so
if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these
instructions ;-).

Usage
There are two ways to use the apache-manager package: As the command line
program apache-manager and as a Python API. For details about the Python
API please refer to the API documentation available on Read the Docs. The
command line interface is described below.

Command line
Usage: apache-manager [OPTIONS]
Command line interface to monitor the Apache web server and kill worker
processes that exceed resource thresholds. When no options are given the
server metrics and memory usage of workers are printed to the terminal.
Supported options:

Option
Description

-c, --collect-metrics
Collect monitoring metrics and store them in a text file to be read
by a monitoring system like Zabbix. See also the --data-file option.

-k, --kill-workers
Kill Apache workers exceeding the thresholds given by --max-memory-active,
--max-memory-idle and --max-time. These thresholds can also be defined in
configuration files, please refer to the online documentation for details.
See also the --dry-run option.

-w, --watch
This option causes the Apache manager to redraw the collected metrics once
every 10 seconds in a “top” like interface until interrupted using “q” (for
quite) or Control-C.

-a, --max-memory-active=SIZE
Kill active Apache workers that are using more memory than specified by the
SIZE argument. SIZE is expected to be a human readable memory size like 50K
(50 kilobytes), 42M (42 megabytes), 2G (2 gigabytes), etc.

-i, --max-memory-idle=SIZE
Kill Apache workers that are using more memory than specified by the SIZE
argument (see --max-memory-active for acceptable values of SIZE).

-t, --max-ss, --max-time=TIMESPAN
Kill Apache workers whose “time since the beginning of the most recent
request” is greater than specified by the TIMESPAN argument. TIMESPAN is
expected to be a human readable timespan like 2s (2 seconds), 3m (3
minutes), 5h (5 hours), 2d (2 days), etc.

-T, --hanging-worker-threshold=TIMESPAN
Change the number of seconds before an active worker is considered hanging
to TIMESPAN (see --max-time for acceptable values of TIMESPAN).

-f, --data-file=PATH
Change the pathname of the file where the Apache manager stores monitoring
metrics after every run. Defaults to “/tmp/apache-manager.txt”.

-z, --zabbix-discovery
Generate a JSON fragment that’s compatible with the low-level discovery
support in the Zabbix monitoring system. With the right template in place
this enables the Zabbix server to discover the names of the WSGI process
groups that are active on any given server. This makes it possible to
collect and analyze the memory usage of specific WSGI process groups.

-n, --dry-run, --simulate
Don’t actually kill any Apache workers.

-v, --verbose
Increase verbosity (can be repeated).

-q, --quiet
Decrease verbosity (can be repeated).

-h, --help
Show this message and exit.

Contact
The latest version of apache-manager is available on PyPI and GitHub. The
documentation is hosted on Read the Docs and includes a changelog. For bug
reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions,
etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.

License
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2020 Peter Odding.