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.