How To: Monitor your server with munin - Overclock.net

kc-tr · 05-19-07

More and more people are getting linux based systems up, for various things such as SMP folding, File/Web Servers, or to just learn how to use it. One of the things that almost everyone here does, no matter if you are overclocking or not, is monitor their systems, cpu usage, memory usage, cpu temp etc.. Well this guide will show you how to setup munin, a system monitoring utility for linux based systems, which will not only monitor your systems but give you very nice, and web viewable graphs of resource usage and temperatures so you can monitor from another system on your LAN or from school or work!

In this guide we will use ubuntu because alot of people are moving to this distro for its ease of use and compatibility.

First open a terminal
Main Menu>Accessories>Terminal

Once you have your terminal open type the following command.
As root:

Quote:

apt-get install munin munin-node

Using sudo:

Quote:

sudo apt-get install munin munin-node

This will install the required munin, node and server software. Once this is complete we need to configure the munin config file. To do this as previously shown, open a terminal then type the following command:

Quote:

vi /etc/munin/munin.conf

This will open the config file via the vi console based text editor. If you need help using vi use this link for a guide. Click Here
once this is open you will have a file with a bunch of information in it. The information that we need to focus on is this:

Quote:

dbdir /var/lib/munin
htmldir /var/www/munin
logdir /var/log/munin
rundir /var/run/munin

tmpldir /etc/munin/templates

[localhost.localdomain]
address 127.0.0.1
use_node_name yes

Edit these according to how your system is setup, if you are running ubuntu 7.04 you can just copy what I have here, or edit yours to look like this. You dont need to use exactly this on the localhost.localdomain section however I would recommend only editingthe portion of [localhost.localdomain]

Next we will create the directory where munin will store the output information, change the directory ownership to the user and group munin, then restart to finish the installation. To do this copy paste or enter each line below individually, or edit this according to your system.

Quote:

mkdir -p /var/www/munin
chown munin:munin /var/www/munin
/etc/init.d/munin-node restart

Once installation is complete, and the service has been restarted wait a few minutes for munin to create its first output information then visit http://localhost/munin/ to view the information. It does take a few hours for it to really start building information for it to graph however after it has been running for a while you will have something similar to these graphs shown below.

Cpu Usage

Memory Usage

Hope this is helpful for everyone, and let me know if you need any help! If you would like to see mine it is currently up and running and can be viewed by using the following link!!
http://70.243.230.82/munin/localdoma...caldomain.html

Dezixn · 05-19-07

Cool.

Any chance you know how to get fahmon to work with a vmware linux suse smp folding setup lol.

Puckbandit35 · 05-19-07

THANK YOU

Great guide

+ Rep

kc-tr · 05-19-07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dezixn

Cool.

Any chance you know how to get fahmon to work with a vmware linux suse smp folding setup lol.

lol no, I usually just VNC into the linux box to see where she is in folding. Never have used fahmon, I think a few of the other members have, you might open a thread on it.

Quote:

THANK YOU

Great guide

+ Rep

Thanks! hope it was useful

Knitelife · 05-19-07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dezixn

Cool.

Any chance you know how to get fahmon to work with a vmware linux suse smp folding setup lol.

I have it working with my VMWare and Native Linux boxes. I will slap together a walkthrough for ya and post it.

dhrandy · 05-21-07

Nice guide.

AMD Dave · 05-29-07

Nice FAQ, although I'm unable to view the graphs on my browser.

I've gotten munin installed and loaded as per your instructions, but whenever I try to view the results in Firefox I get "Unable to Connect"

Any ideas? I am running Ubuntu 7.04

Oh and also when not the root user, i.e. Ubuntu

Quote:

chown munin:munin /var/www/munin
/etc/init.d/munin-node restart

Should be:

Quote:

sudo chown munin:munin /var/www/munin
sudo /etc/init.d/munin-node restart

EDIT: I've found away to view the graphs in Firefox using this as the address:

Quote:

file:///var/www/munin/localdomain/index.html

Although this is kind of cheating because I'm just looking at a file, and there would be know way to view it remotely (right?).
How can I view the results by entering a proper address? And how heavy is this on resources?

kc-tr · 05-29-07

Sounds like you are pretty good at researcching, which means you will be good with linux lol. You have to have apache running, make sure apache is installed and running, you can check the process list by bringing up a terminal and type in top. If it is running make sure it is running on the correct port which it should be on 80. If it is running and is on the proper port, check your firewall if installed. No it uses very little resources, because it runs as an idle process and just collects the data via system logs. Yes you can view it remotely, because before my rig went down a few days ago I have it viewable for everyone.

AMD Dave · 05-30-07

Thanks, that was it, I didn't have apache installed. You might want to edit that in for those like me who don't know that.

To start running apache2 I typed into a terminal:

Code:

~$ sudo apache2 -k start

Is this the correct way to do that? Also will apache start running upon start-up, or do I have to make an entry for this in Sessions>Start-Up?

Once again thanks

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How To: Monitor your server with munin

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