Munin-Node

A tarball of all relevant files can be found here.

All files are hereby released under the GNU Public License version 2, and are apparently copyrighted by Oregon State University.

There are 2 major parts to this system. The first is the cf.classes file, which simply describes which hosts belong in each class. The relevant classes are as follows:

service_munin_host  = ( larch )
service_munin_node  = ( binhost columbia coos fir fraxinus g1 g2 g3 g4 )
package_munin_node  = ( service_munin_node www_phpbb_com )

The second part is the cf.munin file, which holds all the rules that each host should follow. Included are several support files that do such things as generate the munin.conf file, since that is difficult to do by hand.

Munin showed the most promise and compatibility with many of the services we run at the OSL, such as memcached and varnish. I liked how the plugin system is set up independently on each host, and that each plugin can be managed, configured, and consolidated through symlinks.

For the benefit of the uninitiated the setup on each node goes something like this:

#For gentoo
emerge munin
#For Fedora/CentOS
yum install munin-node
#For Debian/Ubuntu
apt-get install munin-node

Each client is a “node”, and runs the daemon ‘munin-node’. It’s configuration file exists at /etc/munin/munin-node.conf. This file merely tells the daemon which user to run as, which interface/port to listen to, where to log, and which munin masters are allowed to poll statistics.