I took the latter route with the help of m/monit, a small open-source utility for managing and monitoring Linux systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

While it may sound complicated, setting it up is actually quite straightforward.

Installation

As always, update the system first to keep the system update-to-date first.

sudo apt update & sudo apt upgrade

Then, install Monit from the Ubuntu repository.

sudo apt install monit

To verify the version after the installation,

sudo monit -V

Configure the web service

The nice thing about Monit is that it comes with a web interface for monitoring and managing the configured services. The default port is on 2812 but you can change that by modifying the configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/monit/monitrc

First, change the default monitoring interval if needed.

set daemon 120

Then, to enable and change the web interface settings, uncomment or change the following lines.

set httpd port 2812
  use address localhost    # only accept connection from localhost
  allow admin:monit        # required user credential

If you need to check the web interface remotely, comment out the localhost line and add the following instead.

allow ipaddress/32

Monitoring MySQL and Apache services

To monitor the MySQL service,

sudo nano /etc/monit/conf.d/mysql

and add the following lines:

check process mysql with pidfile /run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
    start program = "/usr/sbin/service mysql start" with timeout 60 seconds
    stop program  = "/usr/sbin/service mysql stop"
    if failed unixsocket /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock then restart

To monitor the Apache service,

sudo nano /etc/monit/conf.d/apache

and add the following lines:

check process apache2 with pidfile /run/apache2/apache2.pid
    start program = "/bin/systemctl start apache2.service" with timeout 15 seconds
    stop program  = "/bin/systemctl stop apache2.service"
    restart program = "/bin/systemctl restart apache2.service"

Now, reload the Monit service,

sudo service monit reload

And check the web interface now.

#1273 - Unknown collation: 'utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci'

The problem is, the server that runs the live database is MySQL 5.7 that supports utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci but the test server I run is only MySQL 5.5 which does not support this specific encoding.

By the way, to check which version of MySQL you are running, run the following command:

mysql -V

The easiest way to fix this collation error is to upgrade MySQL 5.5 to either 5.6 or 5.7. Since the version of my test machine is Ubuntu 14.04, I can easily upgrade it to 5.6 by following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install mysql-client-core-5.6
sudo apt-get install mysql-client-5.6
sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.6

The restore went successfully once the server is upgraded to 5.6.

You may want to back up all databases and restore them back, in case anything goes wrong.

To back up all databases at once,

mysqldump --lock-all-tables -u root -p --all-databases > dump.sql

To restore them all once the server is upgraded,

mysql -u root -p < dump.sql

If upgrading MySQL isn’t an option for you, you will need to modify the backup file by replacing all utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci with utf8mb4_unicode_ci. Not ideal, but still works.