I'm becoming a dying breed where I work. More and more sys admins are advocating automatically restarting failed services such as tomcat, jboss, etc. I've always been against doing this except with buggy apps that can't be fixed or avoided.

My main argument is that I feel it's a trick used by lazy sys admins who don't want to troubleshoot their apps. Almost everything we have that is customer facing is behind a load balancer (we have a lot of customers). If the LB is properly configured, it will pull a node out of the rotation if it fails a health check. If the pool is sized properly it will have at least n+1 servers running and should be able to handle the load if one node dies or is removed. I feel we should let the app fail, alert on it, remove it from the pool, and troubleshoot it to find out why. Turn up a new node to take it's place if necessary. If the bad app is auto restarted and it is indeed bad, we will continue to route customers to it and it could negatively affect them.

They argue that "apps just fail" and that we should restart them asap to keep them up and servicing customers.

I'm starting to feel like the old geezer of the group and these damn kids won't get off my lawn. If you wouldn't mind, please let me know your take on this. I'm not looking for everyone to agree with me and I'm not against changing my views. They just haven't provided a good argument.

Thanks,

MG