99% of the time you can just use the local address to talk to yourself. This is just an example to show you how wrangle the ip address using awk. Rewrite the hosts file so the host itself can use it’s external address by name. Write out the basic stuff in hosts that doesn’t change then write out the current IP address.

Monitor all the usual stuff like processes, files, directories, disk space, etc. AND set up simple processes for restarting services or umounting partitions when they reach thresholds. The monit.conf syntax is very straight-forward. I like the way they haven’t added any useless complexity as just an attempt to make it look sophisticated. I currently use mrtg to monitor bandwidth utilization, cpu usage, and even disk space on a group of servers, and i’ve used cacti and nagios in the past, but monit is by far the easiest to get setup and running. Of the three, it’s definitely the quickest to setup with the least hassle. I gave up on nagios and all its plugins a long time ago, so maybe that project has been revamped, but I dont plan on trying it out again anytime soon.