On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 10:02 PM Clark Tony <Tony.Clark at uk.mizuho-sc.com> wrote:
No matter what I do I cannot get iostat to report on Hobbit (RHEL clients)
Can you describe what you have done? Are there instructions you've followed for this?
I have also followed the documentation and added TRENDS as directed which also makes no difference.
Are you referring to adding TRENDS:*,iostat to the host entries in hosts.cfg? This is necessary but not sufficient. If you're not getting RRD files named iostat.*.rrd, then there's nothing to graph on the trends page.
From reviewing the source code, I believe that iostat gets its input from the [iostatdisk] section of the client data. This is only reported by the Solaris client. There doesn't appear to be any support for iostat for any other OS.
This was discussed a few years ago on this list in this thread:
http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/2014-January/038955.html
The bottom line is that iostat supported in Xymon is only for Solaris, and only handles the output of the Solaris iostat command. Adding support for other OSes would be possible - with some source code changes - but not trivial. Each OS would need its own code enhancements.
People have implemented iostat monitoring in other ways with custom scripts, which you can read about in the thread.
Part of the problem here is that every different OS has a different iostat command output and parameters, which means OS-specific code needs to be written on both client and server. Few people have access to all of the supported OSes, to ensure a consistent iostat experience. Personally, I think all clients should be enhanced to report several [sar] sections into the client data, including for example [sar-d] (because "sar -d" gives most of the same details as "iostat -x", and would probably work on most OSes). Three advantages of using sar are: a) it tends to be much more uniform across different OSes, which means that the same parsing code can be used on the Xymon server; b) it is more likely to be present (or available to install) on a variety of OSes compared with other similar tools, which tend to be written for one OS and ported to others; c) it has modes for collecting more different types of instrumentation than most other similar tools.
J