Introduction

Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitor as many services and system resources as possible. It has been created to be used under production UNIX/Linux servers, but due to its simplicity and small size you may also use it to monitor embedded devices as well. The current status of your best host with Monitorix installed on can be accessed via a web browser.

It mainly consists of two programs; a collector called monitorix, which is a Perl daemon that is started automatically like any other system service, and a CGI script called monitorix.cgi.

Everytime monitorix is started it reads the configuration file from the path specified in the command line (using the -c option), and once checked, it creates the index.html file that will act as the Monitorix main page.

It also creates a file called $BASE_DIR/cgi-bin/monitorix.conf.path that includes the absolute path of the configuration file. This file will be read by monitorix.cgi to know the exact location of the configuration file. If by any reason it is unable to locate this file, it will try two possible locations; /etc/monitorix.conf and /usr/local/etc/monitorix.conf.

History

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

On March 2006, Monitorix included 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 and help, and for being good friends during the porting process.

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

With the release 2.0.0 Monitorix suffered a complete rewrite, including new features and graphs, cleaned up all the code, updated and enhanced a number of aspects in some graphs, and fixed a lot of bugs. The most important change was that it no longer required crond to work, instead Monitorix became a complete standalone Perl daemon being started and stopped like any other system service.

Since the release 2.2.0 Monitorix included support for OpenBSD systems. My special thanks to Devio.us team for giving me a free shell account where to put hands to work.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The configuration file is a Perl file where you set the values 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) and monitorix(8) man pages.

Requirements

Monitorix requires some others packages to be installed that your GNU/Linux distribution may or may not have:

• A CGI capable Web server (Apache, Nginx, lighttpd, etc.)
• Perl
• Perl-CGI
• Perl-MailTools
• Perl-MIME-Lite
• Perl-libwww
• RRDtool and its Perl bindings (perl-rrdtool or rrdtool-perl)