Munin server stat graphing tool

My friend Todd (blog) pointed me to a cool piece of software. Munin is a piece of software that wll show information about a computer in a graphical format. One of the interesting things that I like about this is that the software is broken into two pieces. A node that gathers information on a machine, and a server that connects to different nodes, and graphs this information. So I have one machine running the server, while it is gathering this statistical information from all of my servers.




Here are the steps that I used to install munin:

1. Create user and group 'munin'
2. run 'make install-main'
3. create a cron entry for user munin that runs '/opt/munin/bin/munin-cron' every 5 minutes
4. run 'make install-doc install-man'
5. run 'make install-node install-node-plugins'
6. run 'munin-node-configure --shell | sh'
7. create the following init script
• !/bin/sh
  #
  # munin This shell script takes care of starting and stopping
  # munin.
  #
  # chkconfig: - 96 29
  # description: munin is a script that keeps track of process on different servers
  # processname: munin-node
  # config: /root/.fetchmailrc
  
  # Source function library.
  . /etc/init.d/functions
  
  # Source networking configuration.
  . /etc/sysconfig/network
  
  
  munin=/opt/munin/sbin/munin-node
  
  function start() {
  # Start daemons.
  echo -n "munin:"
  /opt/munin/sbin/munin-node
  RETVAL=$?
  }
  
  function stop() {
  # Stop daemons.
  echo -n "Shutting down munin: "
  killall munin-node
  RETVAL=$?
  
  return $RETVAL
  }
  
  # See how we were called.
  case "$1" in
  start)
  start
  ;;
  stop)
  stop
  ;;
  restart)
  stop
  start
  ;;
  *)
  ;;
  *)
  echo "Usage: $0 start|stop|restart}"
  RETVAL=1
  esac
  
  exit $RETVAL
  
  
8. copy the plugin.conf to /etc/opt/munin/plugin-conf.d/
9. Modify /opt/munin/lib/plugins/postfix_mailstats /opt/munin/lib/plugins/postfix_mailvolume so LOGFILE is "maillog"
10. Create a sym link for postfix_mailstats and postfix_mailvolume into /etc/opt/munin/plugins
11. run /etc/init.d/munin start