[Announce] Monit 5.3

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

Hi, everyone!

We have just released Monit 5.3. You can download the new release from:

http://mmonit.com/monit/download/


Release information:
====================

This release includes two new great features; 

1) A new 'check program' statement was added to Monit. This allows
   Monit to check the exit status of an external program or script. 
   For example:

     check program myscript with path "/usr/local/bin/myscript.sh"
           if status != 0 then alert

   Here, myscript is executed by Monit and an alert is sent if the
   script does not return 0. The alert email will also include any
   (stderr) output made by the script.

   Please see 
http://mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html#program_status_testing for a 
discussion on this new feature.


2) A new crontab style check has been added for individual services.
   You can now specify when an individual service should be checked 
   or, maybe more important, when a service should not be checked by
   Monit.

     Example 2: Check myscript every workday between 8AM and 7PM
   
     check program myscript with path "/usr/local/bin/myscript.sh"
        every "* 8-19 * * 1-5"
   
     Example 2: Do not check mysqld on Sundays between 0AM and 3AM
   
     check process mysqld with pidfile /var/run/mysqld.pid
        not every "* 0-3 * * 0"

   Please see 
http://mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html#service_poll_time for more 
information on this feature.


Other improvements

* HTML view improvements

* Connection retry option added. Allows to retry a network
  connection in the same testing cycle before reporting an error.

* Detailed protocol connection errors are now included in alerts. 

* Changed the HTML overview page to display CPU and memory total
  (including children) so real service related usage is displayed also
  for services which spawn worker processes, such as Apache or
  Spamassassin.

* Fix MySQL protocol test: MySQL 5.5.12 returns new error code in
  the case of authentication failure.

* Fix Debian bug #621047: Monit fails to build after SSLv2 removal

* Fix crash on Solaris which may occur if the system load is zero.
  Thanks to Paul Sun for report.

* The stacktrace logging on error is disabled in -v (verbose) mode
  as it was too verbose for common service debugging tasks, it can
  be enabled using -vv option.

* Improve how fast Monit check if a program was started or stopped.
  Thanks to Michael Renner for patch. 

* Fix the monitoring state presentation during service restart which
  temporarily displayed "Not monitored", whereas the monitoring was
  enabled.

* The "data collected" is updated only if the check was not skipped.


Contact:
========

If you have questions, comments or any other feedback about this release, 
please reply to this post.


Best regards from the Monit team