Hi all
Google knows a lot about $SUBJECT but unfortunately, a lot of the info is conflicting.
What's the current wisdom for collecting and graphing iostat info on Linux? Specifically, I'm using RHEL5 and RHEL6.
Thanks
CC
-- RHCE#805007969328369
On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 9:52 PM, Colin Coe <colin.coe at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all
Google knows a lot about $SUBJECT but unfortunately, a lot of the info is conflicting.
What's the current wisdom for collecting and graphing iostat info on Linux? Specifically, I'm using RHEL5 and RHEL6.
Have you looked into sysstat package?
Thanks
CC
-- RHCE#805007969328369
Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
-- Asif Iqbal PGP Key: 0xE62693C5 KeyServer: pgp.mit.edu A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Asif Iqbal <vadud3 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 9:52 PM, Colin Coe <colin.coe at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all
Google knows a lot about $SUBJECT but unfortunately, a lot of the info is conflicting.
What's the current wisdom for collecting and graphing iostat info on Linux? Specifically, I'm using RHEL5 and RHEL6.
Have you looked into sysstat package?
To what end? It provides the iostat utility but that was not the question.
Thanks
CC
-- Asif Iqbal PGP Key: 0xE62693C5 KeyServer: pgp.mit.edu A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-- RHCE#805007969328369
On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 09:52 +0800, Colin Coe wrote:
Hi all
Google knows a lot about $SUBJECT but unfortunately, a lot of the info is conflicting.
What's the current wisdom for collecting and graphing iostat info on Linux? Specifically, I'm using RHEL5 and RHEL6.
Hi,
I recently asked about monitoring iostat myself - see the thread here http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/2012-August/035229.html
One reply mentions some scripts on xymonton. I also received a private reply that there were some scripts on Sourceforge - search for 'Linux iostat'.
I ended up writing a reasonably short script myself which runs on the clients. It records the 'avtime', 'svctime' and the percent 'busy' values. I produce two graphs - one for the percent busy, the other shows both time values. Both graphs appear in 'trends', and the 'busy' graph appears on an 'iostats' test status page. (Note, because Xymon already sort of knows about an 'iostat' test I could not use that name, so used 'iostats' instead.) The script sends a 'status' report (using 'xymon <server> "status ...") for the 'iostats' test. If the percent busy is high it sends a yellow status, if it is very high then a red status is sent. Additionally, a 'data' report (using 'xymon <server> "data ...") containing the time and busy values is sent back to the Xymon server. On the server I run a script which is used by 'xymon_rrd' (via the '--extra-script' and '--extra-tests' options; see the man page and look in tasks.cfg). The script tells Xymon what RRD files to create and what the DS entries and values are, from the data received from the client. (Sorry, that may all sound horrendously complicated. However, it works very well, and once set up is very easy to maintain. I currently run three tests like this.)
I would say that monitoring iostat has proved to be useful to us. It is not something we monitored with Big Brother, but has already shown that we have two servers which regularly show very high disk I/O. No idea why yet.
John.
-- John Horne, Plymouth University, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287 Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 4:43 AM, John Horne <john.horne at plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 09:52 +0800, Colin Coe wrote:
Hi all
Google knows a lot about $SUBJECT but unfortunately, a lot of the info is conflicting.
What's the current wisdom for collecting and graphing iostat info on Linux? Specifically, I'm using RHEL5 and RHEL6.
Hi,
I recently asked about monitoring iostat myself - see the thread here http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/2012-August/035229.html
One reply mentions some scripts on xymonton. I also received a private reply that there were some scripts on Sourceforge - search for 'Linux iostat'.
I ended up writing a reasonably short script myself which runs on the clients. It records the 'avtime', 'svctime' and the percent 'busy' values. I produce two graphs - one for the percent busy, the other shows both time values. Both graphs appear in 'trends', and the 'busy' graph appears on an 'iostats' test status page. (Note, because Xymon already sort of knows about an 'iostat' test I could not use that name, so used 'iostats' instead.) The script sends a 'status' report (using 'xymon <server> "status ...") for the 'iostats' test. If the percent busy is high it sends a yellow status, if it is very high then a red status is sent. Additionally, a 'data' report (using 'xymon <server> "data ...") containing the time and busy values is sent back to the Xymon server. On the server I run a script which is used by 'xymon_rrd' (via the '--extra-script' and '--extra-tests' options; see the man page and look in tasks.cfg). The script tells Xymon what RRD files to create and what the DS entries and values are, from the data received from the client. (Sorry, that may all sound horrendously complicated. However, it works very well, and once set up is very easy to maintain. I currently run three tests like this.)
I would say that monitoring iostat has proved to be useful to us. It is not something we monitored with Big Brother, but has already shown that we have two servers which regularly show very high disk I/O. No idea why yet.
John.
-- John Horne, Plymouth University, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287 Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001
Thanks John & Alan
I've now looked at a few iostat monitors for xymon including http://sourceforge.net/projects/xy-alfanoid/files/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/xy-alfanoid/files/.
One of the common things I really don't like is the modification of the TEST2RRD variable within xymonserver.cfg. My guess is this is unavoidable but it means manually handling after xymon upgrades and I have more than enough to do now than worry about manual steps after software upgrades.
Henrik, is there a good way that the above can be handled? xymonserver.cfg looks like a shell script, does it act like one? e.g. can we do something like 'TEST2RRD=$TEST2RRD:customtest=a,b,c' in an include file. Same for GRAPHS. Apologies if this is spelt out somewhere and I've missed it. BTW, I really like the "*.d" directories that have come in in very recent xymon versions. Referring to http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/2012-August/035231.html, what would it take to get the iostat tests up to scratch? (I'm selfishly referring exclusively to Linux, specifically RHEL5 and above.)
While I'm on a bit of a whine, in the RHEL/Fedora realm, nagios for example has heaps of plugin RPMs. I would be great if the best of breed custom tests were assembled and packaged in a similar manner.
Lastly, this email is not intended to offend, just to try and get the best solution for monitoring disk stats possible.
Thanks
CC
-- RHCE#805007969328369
On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 08:12 +0800, Colin Coe wrote:
One of the common things I really don't like is the modification of the TEST2RRD variable within xymonserver.cfg. My guess is this is unavoidable but it means manually handling after xymon upgrades and I have more than enough to do now than worry about manual steps after software upgrades.
Hello,
Whenever I have reinstalled Xymon, I have not had to modify the config files again at all. They are all left as they were, with backup copies being made (named 'xxx.bak'). The only things I do following reinstallation is to change the ownership of the server/etc/xymonpasswd file to that of the web server username, and remove the '.bak' files (although that is obviously not essential).
John.
-- John Horne Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287 Plymouth University, UK Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001
participants (3)
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colin.coe＠gmail.com
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john.horne＠plymouth.ac.uk
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vadud3＠gmail.com