munin for dummies

Yesterday, my server atuin (which is also serving this page) had some strange outtage. Packetloss at about 90%, even from the same rack (my boss has a server at the same hosting facility too, so I can test inhouse stuff ;)). About one hour later it was back. Without a reboot and without any interesting log-entries.
So I thought, I should setup some kind of monitoring: munin.

munin consists of two parts, a monitor and a node.
The node is a server, which you can gets stats from. The monitor is a small app which collects the stats from the servers and paints nice html.

The installation is quite easy.

Run the following on the server you want to monitor:

# apt-get install munin-node
# $EDITOR /etc/munin/minun-node.conf
host <ipadress_where_munin_should_listen>
allow <regex_of_ipadress_of_the_monitor>
# /etc/init.d/munin-node restart

And this on the one which monitors:

# apt-get install munin
# $EDITOR /etc/munin/munin.conf
[nodename]
address nodeip
use_node_name yes

Wait some minutes and http://monitor/munin/ should show some nice graphs. Yay!

I think I'll post some improved version of the ircu script tomorrow.