3.2 KiB
Monitoring aprsc
It's a good practice to monitor the performance and utilisation of your server, and to generate alarms when it's not working as it should.
aprsc comes with a munin plugin which makes it very easy to set up statistics graphs. Comparing graphs for aprsc against the graphs for the rest of the system can be very helpful in diagnosing performance issues. Seeing all those statistics also gives a nice warm fuzzy feeling from knowing how how the server is doing and what it is spending all those electrons on.
For example, please take a look at my aprsc-specific Munin graphs from T2FINLAND.
Setting up munin on Debian or Ubuntu
Munin consists of two pieces, an agent running on all servers (munin-node), collecting raw numbers from the operating system and the software running on it, and the master data collector (munin). If you have many servers, put the master data collector on just one of them (that server needs to have a web server to publish the statistics). If you have a single server, put a web server, the agent and the master on that.
Installing the agent, the master and the standard Apache web server:
sudo apt-get install munin-node munin apache2-mpm-worker
It will pull up quite a few other packages as dependencies, but that's OK.
Setting up munin on other Linux distributions
Instructions for each distribution can be found on munin's home page.
Setting up the munin plugin
If munin is installed when installing or upgrading aprsc, aprsc's post-install script will automatically configure aprsc's munin plugin.
If you have aprsc running already, reconfigure it:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure aprsc
That'll set up the munin plugin (among a few other things, like triggering a live upgrade to the current version). Now, you'll need to give munin a kick to make it notice the new plugins:
sudo /etc/init.d/munin-node restart
Future versions of aprsc might do that automatically for you.
Wait!
Wait for some 10-15 minutes. Have a nice cup of coffee or tea, or some other beverage according to your personal preference. Munin updates every 5 minutes, but after installation or adding new plugins, it'll take a couple of rounds before it starts generating graphs for those.
See.
Surf to http://yourserver.example.com/munin/ and browse around! Ooops, got a "403 Forbidden" error? Proceed to the next step.
Edit the web server's config file
At least on debian, the web server is configured by default to only allow a local web browser to access the Munin subdirectory. Open up /etc/apache2/conf.d/munin in your favourite text editor, and put your own IP address, network or domain on and allow line. You can add new Allow lines next to the one that's already there, like this:
Allow from 44.0.0.0/8
Allow from .ampr.org
After editing apache's config file, tell it to re-read configuration by doing a graceful restart:
sudo apache2ctl graceful
And surf to http://yourserver.example.com/munin/ again.
Setting up nagios alarms
TODO: write