Monit sends an alert every time the monit daemon is stopped or started. This is obnoxious and not useful information.
According to the docs, I set:
set alert user@mycompany.com but not on { instance }
…which should send alerts to that e-mail, unless they are in the "instance" category, which is defined as starts/stops.
However, I still get alerts generated. This is super annoying. Clearly I must be missing something.
We're running Monit 5.2.4
Best Answer
Monit can, according to the documentation generate a number of alerts:
We were able to fix this on our side by setting (addresses changed to protect the innocent):
This successfully routes the messages to the adresses we care about. You can set them globallly or locally, but our alerts are just global.
The subheadings under SERVICE TESTS at: http://mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html correspond fairly neatly to the types above.
For each scheduled process or feature of your server, you should be able to come up with what matters to you in plain English, and match that desire to one of the tests mentioned in SERVICE TESTS. For example, if I'm running Apache, I know that I care about:
For a custom daemon that polls, I may care about whether the log file is getting updated with status messages regularly (timestamp).