Introduction

Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitorize as many services as possible. At this time it monitors from the CPU load and temperatures to the users using the system. Network devices activity, network services demand and even the devices' interrupt activity are also monitored, and more. The current status of any corporate server with Monitorix installed can be accessed via a web browser.

It has been designed to be used under production UNIX/Linux servers, but due its simplicity and small size you can use it to monitor embedded devices.

All its development was initially created for monitoring Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS Linux systems, so this project was made keeping in mind these distributions. Today it runs on different Linux distributions and even in other UNIX systems like FreeBSD.

On March 2006, Monitorix included a minimal support to run on FreeBSD systems. My special thanks to twenty4help Knowledge Service (http://www.twenty4help.com) and to Roger "Rocky" Vetterberg for their support, help and for to be a good friends during all the portability process.

Since the release 1.3.2 though, Monitorix has almost full support for FreeBSD. My special thanks to Pavlin Vatev who generoulsy offered his support during all the process.

Besides the above mentioned systems there are supported too the following Linux distributions. Some of they covered by the install.sh script:

• Arch
• Debian (Ubuntu)
• Gentoo (it's recommended to use the ebuild)
• Slackware
• openSuSE

For people coming from other Linux distributions the same install.sh comes with the Generic option. You can adjust the paths before using it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The installation script is NOT the recommened method of installing Monitorix in your system. You must check first if your distribution has already packaged Monitorix and if it's downloadable from a repository near you or directly from the Monitorix web site.

Monitorix has a configuration file called monitorix.conf to adapt your server to it. Each configuration option is commented in the same file, although for a complete description you may read the monitorix.conf(5) man page included in the package.

NOTE: The configuration file is a Perl file where you set the value directly to the variables that Monitorix will use during its normal operation. So you must take special precaution to not break some Perl basic syntax.

Please, see the monitorix.conf(5) man page.

Requirements

This package requires some others packages to be installed that your Linux distribution may not have them:

• rrdtool and rrdtool-perl - You can download it from lot of places:
  • http://apt.sw.be/
  • http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/
  • RRDtool project
• metamail - To be removed in near future, but needed right now only for monthly reports:
  • You can search for it on http://www.rpmfind.net.
• Optionally you may need the lm_sensors and hddtemp tools to enable the temperature graphs.

Installation on a RedHat/Fedora/CentOS Linux

Once downloaded the RPM file, you can install it using:

# rpm -ivh monitorix-n.n.n.noarch.rpm
(where n.n.n is the latest version)
      

Once succesfully installed, you may want to make some adaptations in the configuration file located in /etc/monitorix.conf. And finally you'll be able to start the Monitorix shell-script based daemon with:

# service monitorix start
      

At this point, Monitorix will start collecting system information, and you'll be able to see it from your favorite browser pointing it to:

http://localhost/monitorix
Don't forget to start the Apache web server!.

Installation on a generic UNIX/Linux system

Once downloaded the tar.gz file, you can install it using:

# cd monitorix-n.n.n
(where n.n.n is the latest version)

# ./install.sh
      

Once succesfully installed, you may want to make some adaptations in the configuration file located in /usr/local/etc/monitorix.conf. And finally you'll be able to start the Monitorix shell-script based daemon with:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/monitorix.sh start
      

At this point, Monitorix will start collecting system information, and you'll be able to see it from your favorite browser pointing it to:

http://localhost/monitorix
Don't forget to start the Apache web server!.

Notes after installation

If your system have SELinux enabled by default it is possible your Monitorix graphs won't be visible and you get lot of messages in dmesg and in /var/log/messages about access denied to the RRD database files. I don't know enough SELinux to adapt Monitorix to it, so in that case my only recommendation is to disable SELinux, adding the line SELINUX=disabled in /etc/selinux/config or with the kernel parameter selinux=0.

Check that the /var/log/httpd directory have enough read permissions for the user running the Apache server. In the newer Fedora Core versions this directory have the permissions restricted to only the root user.