How to Setup Munin Monitoring System on CentOS 7

Hello Everybody! Welcome to our today’s article on one the most widely used, free of cost and Open Source Munin Network Resource Monitoring System. Its a perl software application can help you monitoring your each and every asset that keeps record of it and sends you the critical alerts of services for your servers, switches, applications, and any any other devices connected to your network whether its your computers, network, storage or the whole IT infrastructure. It shows all the information in graphs through a web interface that emphasis on plug and play capabilities.

Munin has a master/node architecture in which the master connects to all the nodes at regular intervals and asks them for data, then stores the data in RRD files to updates the graphs if needed. So, after completing its installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

Prerequisites

Your systems hardware resources depends upon your own requirements while in this article we will be using the following system resource for Munin installation on CentOS 7.

Munin installation setup requires the basic web server packages to be installed on the server. So, after basic networking setup configure your hostname, IP address and firewall settings by keeping SELinux into permissive mode.

Then start installing packages by update your system first and enabling EPEL repository on it using below commands.

# yum install epel-release
# rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7

# yum update

You will be asked to press "Y" key and hit Enter to proceed for installing all required updates. Once the updates are successfully installed on your system then proceed to the installation of Apache Web server.

Apache Web Setup

To setup your Apache web server, we need to start by installing its package using the below 'yum' command.

# yum install httpd

Upon completion of packages installation, start and enable its service and check that its active and enabled using the following commands respectively.

# systemctl enable httpd
# systemctl start httpd
# systemctl status httpd

Installing Munin

We can install Munin and Munin Node using the below 'yum' command through its available repository on CentOS 7 as shown.

# yum install munin munin-node

Hit "Y" plus Enter key to start installation of Munin and Munin Noe including a large number its required dependencies.

Once the installation is complete, start its service and enable it at auto start during reboot by using the following commands.

Munin Configurations

Now configure Munin by open its default configuration using any editor as used in below command.

# vim /etc/munin/munin.conf

# a simple host tree, change localhost with your FQDN.

[localhost]
address 127.0.0.1
use_node_name yes
:wq!

After saving the Munin configuration file, Open its apache virtual host configuration file to add access permissions to your network.

# vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/munin.conf

After saving the configuration file changes , restart apache web server service using command below.

# systemctl restart httpd

Now we are going to add a new user and password to the /etc/munin/munin-htpasswd file as the Munin statistics are protected with a username and password, so we need to setup the basic Apache Authentication.

# htpasswd -c /etc/munin/munin-htpasswd admin

This will add a new user with the name "admin" and asks for the new password as shown.

# vi /etc/munin/munin-node.conf

host_name munin.linoxide.com

Save and close the file and restart munin-node services and access the following link by mentioning your FQDN or IP from the client which is in your network that was allowed in configuration file.

http://your_servers_IP/munin

Welcome to Munin Web Console

Here is the Munin dashboard, now you can check the graphs of your required servers.

We can customize Munin dashboard by adding different available plugins and add multiple node to it. While using its web console we have options to create multiple groups and categories according to the required group of services.

You can check and see the status of your critical service by opening its graph from the Munin web console that will show you the current and past data from its maintained hostory as shown in below image.

Conclusion

Munin installation has been setup. We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The installation of Munin is quite simple, now simply add the client node and start monitoring your whole IT infrastructure using this awesome tool without paying any charges. Now enjoy using Munin on your environment and feel free to share your thoughts or suggestions in comments section.

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