In one of my Rails projects I'm using Sphinx to provide full-text search capabilities. To integrate both worlds I chose Thinking Sphinx, which is just great and so far has met all of my expectations. Also, as I previously mentioned, I'm using RVM to manage my ruby installations on both my development and production machines and this setup is what motivated this post. I use Monit to monitor the services running on my production server - nginx, mysql, php - and as of the first deploy of this application, it only made sense to also monitor Sphinx.