I have a few Debian servers that run at home and on VPSs. I wanted to add some basic systems monitoring to them, but didn’t want anything too complicated to look after. I found Monitorix.

Monitorix is a free, 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 Linux/UNIX servers, but due to its simplicity and small size can be used on embedded devices as well.

Install Monitorix

This install has been tested on Debian Squeeze and Wheezy. First install the dependencies.

sudo apt-get install rrdtool perl libwww-perl libmailtools-perl \
libmime-lite-perl librrds-perl libdbi-perl libxml-simple-perl \
libhttp-server-simple-perl libconfig-general-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl

Now Monitorix itself.

wget -c "http://apt.izzysoft.de/ubuntu/dists/generic/index.php?file=monitorix_3.5.1-izzy1_all.deb" -O monitorix_3.5.1-izzy1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i monitorix_3.5.1-izzy1_all.deb

At this point Monitorix is installed and running. Point your browser to http://example.org:8080/monitorix/ and enjoy!

Configuring Monitorix

Everything in /etc/monitorix/monitorix.conf is comprehensively documented, just get tweaking.

• http://www.monitorix.org/documentation.html

Each time you update the configuration Monitorix will require a restart.

sudo service monitorix restart

nginx status

If you run nginx then you’ll want to drop the following into /etc/nginx/conf.d/status.conf so that Monitorix can monitor nginx.

server {
    listen localhost:80;
    location /nginx_status {
        stub_status on;
        access_log off;
        allow 127.0.0.1;
        deny all;
    }
}

References

• http://www.monitorix.org/doc-debian.html