This plugin exposes various endpoints that can be wired to load balancers and monitoring systems to help expose when things go wrong.
NOTE: In an ideal world this plugin should be redundant and most of it's functionality built into core as a new API, enabling each plugin to delare it's own extra health checks. See:
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-47271
This is the index.php check, and is designed to only assert that the front end is healthy and was intended for use as a load balancer test.
eg it might chech the connection to the filesystem, but not stress too much about the health of the filesystem itself. The reason for this is that front end health checks that fail for the wrong reasons pull nodes from the load balancer for no reason.
http://moodle.example.com/admin/tool/heartbeat/
It will return a page with either a 200 or 503 response code and if it fails a string for why.
By default it only performs a light check, in particular it does not check the moodle database. To do a full check add this query param:
http://moodle.example.com/admin/tool/heartbeat/?fullcheck
This check can also be run as a CLI:
php index.php fullcheck
Example return values for heartbeat
Example for when the server is healthy.
(HTTP 200)
Server is ALIVE
sitedata OK
Example for when the server is in command line maintenace mode.
(HTTP 200)
Server is in MAINTENANCE
sitedata OK
Example for when the server is not healthy.
(HTTP 503)
Server is DOWN
Failed: database error
This is the croncheck.php - it is mostly, and was originally only around the cron queues, but has grown to cover other aspects.
It is a nagios compliant checker to see if cron or any individual tasks are failing, with configurable thresholds
This script can be either run from the web:
http://moodle.example.com/admin/tool/heartbeat/croncheck.php
Or can be run as a CLI in which case it will return in the format expected by Nagios:
sudo -u www-data php /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/heartbeat/croncheck.php
The various thresholds can be configured with query params or cli args see this for details:
php croncheck.php -h
The script loginchecker is a nagios compliant checker to monitor the number of failed login attempts on a Moodle site as a security intrusion detection mechanic, with configurable thresholds.
This script can be either run from the web:
http://moodle.example.com/admin/tool/heartbeat/loginchecker.php
Or can be run as a CLI in which case it will return in the format expected by Nagios:
sudo -u www-data php /var/www/moodle/admin/tool/heartbeat/loginchecker.php
The various thresholds can be configured with query params or cli args see this for details:
php loginchecker.php -h
The master branch is always stable and should retain very deep support for old Totara's and Moodle's back to Moodle 2.7
For this reason we will continue to support php5 for some time.
Best to always use the latest version from this git repo:
https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-tool_heartbeat
Or via the Moodle plugin directory (which may be out of date)
https://moodle.org/plugins/view/tool_heartbeat
http://moodle.local/admin/settings.php?section=tool_heartbeat
- Set a fake warning state of 'error' or 'warn'
- By default in a new install this is set to 'error'. This is done intertionally so that you know your monitoring is wired up correctly end to end. You should see you monitoring raise an alert which tells you that it is a test and links to the admin setting to turn it into normal monitoring mode.
- Optionaly lock down the endpoints by IP
When you first setup this plugin and have wired it end to end with Nagios / Icinga or another monitoring tool, you want the peace of mind to know that it is all correctly working. There is a setting which allows you to send a fake warning so you can confirm your pager will go off. This setting is set to 'error' by default by design
http://moodle.local/admin/settings.php?section=tool_heartbeat