title: Monitoring Memcached with PHP script
body: <p>I've written a PHP script that I've scheduled with CRON to run every minute. The goal of the script is to verify that the memcached server is online. My strategy is simply to attempt to connect to the memcached server. If I connect successfully, I close the connection. If I do not successfully connect, I send an email alerting that memcached is offline. </p>
  
  <p>My question: is this a sufficient test that memcached is up and running, or is it common practice to do more than just connect to memcached? Should I also test that I can set and retrieve a key/value pair?</p>
  
  <p>Also, in the future, we may want to do more extensive monitoring of memcached so we can track memory usage, connections, number of requests, etc. Are there open source libraries for doing this from PHP? If so, which ones have performed nicely in your experience?</p>