Monitoring Plesk with Monit

gistfile1.txt

www.fduran.com
Monitoring Plesk with Monit

Plesk is not mentioned anywhere in monit's site http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=plesk+site%3Ammonit.com and I couldn't find any article or tutorial about how to monitor Plesk using Monit, so I'm writing one myself in the hopes other people with the same problem find it.
	
Plesk 8.3 on Centos5	
	
etc/init.d/psa status
psa dead but subsys locked

I check plesk's logs but there's nothing there that sheds light on this issue and server utilization has been low. 
the "solution" given by the vendor is to restart plesk http://kb.parallels.com/6566 (duh! but why is Plesk dying?)	

so I looked into adding Plesk as a monitored service in monit.	
	

upgraded monit to Monit 5.2.5
	
add to monit config file:	
	
check process https with pidfile  /usr/local/psa/admin/logs/httpsd.pid
    start program = "/etc/init.d/psa start"
    stop program  = "/etc/init.d/psa stop"
    if failed host localhost port 8443 type tcpSSL protocol http
       then restart

after restarting monit 

Error: ssl check cannot be activated. SSL is not supported
	
	apt-get install libssl-dev (dind't work) 
	apt-get install openssl-devel (Centos5)
	
	apt-cache search ssl-dev

this fixed the ssl support issue. 	
	
If that monit configuraiton is not working check that the pid file exists at that location when Plesk is running, test plesk (psa) start/stop commands and check monit errors in its log.