Monitoring Servers using Munin

Filed in archive Servers on December 29, 2006

I wrote about monitoring your bandwidth using the Multi Router Traffic Grapher. Today, I present another monitoring tool that provides you with more features, allowing you to not only monitor the network traffic that goes in and out of your servers but also allows you to monitor processes and sensors. The tool is called Munin -- named after one of the Norse god king Odin's ravens. Munin is best described as

the monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine "what's different today" when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you're doing capacity-wise on any resources.

What makes Munin powerful is its flexibility by supporting plug-ins. Users can develop their own plug-ins and submit it to the Munin Exchange site. There are user-contributed plug-ins that monitor the Java Virtual Machine, Xen, SNMP, CPU load and CPU temperatures. Cool, huh?

So what are you waiting for? Go monitor-crazy and see if you need to upgrade your IT infrastructure. :)