Monitorix

Related articles

• Anything-sync-daemon
• lm_sensors
• hddtemp

Monitorix is an 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 many use it on embedded devices as well.

Installation of Monitorix

Visit the AUR and grab the tarball for the monitorix^AUR package and build/install it.

Note: Depending on which font packages are installed on your system, it might been necessary to install the terminus-font package. For now, proceed without it, once monitorix is configured and running, users will know very quickly if they are missing the correct font as the graphs will not contain any text at which point, go ahead and install the terminus-font package via pacman.

Configuration of Monitorix

Before starting the monitorix daemon, be sure to adjust the /etc/monitorix.conf to your liking. For a complete list of options and features, see the [official website] or the included man page for monitor.conf.

Most if not all of the user settings are self explanatory based on the commented text within the conf file itself.

Start Monitorix

Start Monitorix with the included service file like any other systemd service:

# systemctl start monitorix

Viewing Monitorix Data

With the release of version 3.0.0, Monitorix now comes with a light, built in webserver thanks to the dependency on perl-http-server-simple. This is a configuration option in /etc/monitorix.conf which users may elect to either use or not.

Note: This the perl-http-server is defaulted to disabled in /etc/monitorix.conf.

To view system stats, using the perl-http-server, simply point a browser to [http://localhost:8080/monitorix] to see the data.

Note: It will take several minutes before data are displayed graphically so be patient.

Configure an External Webserver

Lighttpd

Lighttpd is another option.

By default, cgi support is not enabled in lighttpd. To enable it and to assign perl to process .cgi files, add the following two lines to /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf:

server.modules		= ( "mod_cgi" )
cgi.assign		= ( ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/perl" )

Apache

Apache is yet another option.

Using tmpfs to Store RRD Databases

Anything-sync-daemon^AUR is a package which provides a pseudo-daemon that makes use of tmpfs to store RRD Databases for Monitorix. Doing so will greatly reduce hdd reads/writes.