What is likely to cause these gaps in monitoring metrics?

Posted on November 28, 2020

Hi folks, I’ve been running a process on an ‘ubuntu-m-8vcpu-64gb’ machine with 200GB SSD, and ran into an issue when monitoring seems to drop and my process never finishes. I tried it twice (1st at 09:00, which failed at 11:30, and the 2nd at 14:30, which failed at 16:00), but I can’t determine if the machine is actually running out of resources. Is there any indication based on my screenshots below as to what might be happening for these gaps to occur?

Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3

If there’s any recommended process logging I could set/check then I’m all ears.

Thanks!

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Bobby

December 2, 2020

Accepted Answer

Hi there @amthomas,

I think that this could be caused by some really high workload on the Droplet so that the whole server gets unresponsive and the monitoring agent is unable to collect any data.

What I would usually do in this case is to put together a short script to note down the processes to a log file so that I could review them later on after the spike and try and figure out what exactly happened. Here is an example script that you could use:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-find-the-processes-that-are-consuming-the-most-server-resources

Another approach rather than using a custom script is to use SAR/systat instead. The sar command allows you to capture the utilization of your resources like RAM, CPU, Disk I/O and etc.

Here is how to install and configure it on Ubuntu:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-install-and-configure-sar-sysstat-on-ubuntu

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby