Today we’ve shipped a new release of Engine Yard Solo. This release includes a ton of bug fixes, but also contains a killer new feature.
We’ve enabled server monitoring for all customers!
Once you enable this new feature by hitting ‘Deploy’ in your dashboard to sync our recipes, you will have full server monitoring enabled for a number of important stats:
- Load Average
- Free Memory
- IO-Wait
- Swap Used
- Free Disk Space for EBS volumes
We will start collecting server alerts for you and displaying them in your dashboard. This is a great feature to give you much more insight into what your slices are doing and how healthy they are. The alerts screen gives you an at-a-glance place to see the health of your deployments — if the top of each section is green you know you are in good shape. If the top of each alert section is yellow or red — you know there may be some issues to look into and what the issues are!
We’ve also released a way for you to tell our automation system that you have local edits to certain config files that you do not want us to stomp on or touch. This is especially important for some apache or nginx vhost files. Before this change there was no way for your local edits to survive a ‘Deploy’ of our recipes. Now if you want to keep a config file with your own edits you just have to rename it with ‘keep.’ prepended to the name.
For example, say you want to edit the nginx vhost for your application that lives at /data/nginx/servers/myapp.conf. If you make changes to this file, all you need to do is rename it to /data/nginx/servers/keep.myapp.conf, and we will never touch that file again until you rename it back or remove it. This gives you the power to make customizations to your vhost configs without us stepping on them later. And since your vhosts are stored on your /data partition, which is an EBS device, your changes will even persist across terminate/create events as long as you mount the same volumes when you boot your environment back up.
I think these features make the platform much more useful and I hope you enjoy using them.
