How to install and configure Munin

Note:
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The monitoring of essential servers and services is an important part of system administration. This guide will show you how to set up Munin for performance monitoring.

In this example, we will use two servers with hostnames: server01 and server02.

Server01 will be set up with the munin package to gather information from the network. Using the munin-node package, server02 will be configured to send information to server01.

Prerequisites

Before installing Munin on server01, Apache2 will need to be installed. The default configuration is fine for running a munin server.

Install munin and munin-node

First, on server01 install the munin package. In a terminal enter the following command:

sudo apt install munin

Now on server02, install the munin-node package:

sudo apt install munin-node

Configure munin

On server01 edit the /etc/munin/munin.conf file, adding the IP address for server02:

## First our "normal" host.
[server02]
       address 172.18.100.101

Note:
Replace server02 and 172.18.100.101 with the actual hostname and IP address for your server.

Configure munin-node

Next, configure munin-node on server02. Edit /etc/munin/munin-node.conf to allow access by server01:

allow ^172\.18\.100\.100$

Note:
Replace ^172\.18\.100\.100$ with the IP address for your munin server.

Now restart munin-node on server02 for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart munin-node.service

Test the setup

In a browser, go to http://server01/munin, and you should see links to nice graphs displaying information from the standard munin-plugins for disk, network, processes, and system. However, it should be noted that since this is a new installation, it may take some time for the graphs to display anything useful.

Additional Plugins

The munin-plugins-extra package contains performance checks and additional services such as DNS, DHCP, and Samba, etc. To install the package, from a terminal enter:

sudo apt install munin-plugins-extra

Be sure to install the package on both the server and node machines.

References

  • See the Munin website for more details.

  • Specifically the Munin Documentation page includes information on additional plugins, writing plugins, etc.

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