Percona Linux Monitoring Template for Cacti¶
These templates use ss_get_by_ssh.php
to connect to a server via SSH and
extract standard metrics such as memory usage, number of users, and CPU usage.
This is a good substitute for the standard kinds of system metrics one might
graph via SNMP, when SNMP is not available or not desired.
Installation¶
Once the SSH connection is working, no special installation is necessary for most of the graphs.
The disk I/O graphs are special. Each graph requires that you specify the
device you want to graph. For /dev/sda
, for example, you should specify
sda
. Do not create the graphs through the normal host template method.
Rather, add the graphs to the host manually, one at a time, by clicking “Create
Graph” and selecting the desired graph template. Edit not only the device name
in the command line, but the name of the graph and data input. Append the name
of the device. This will make the items visually distinctive.
See the following screenshot for an example:

You should append sda
in every textbox shown in that screenshot, if you want
to monitor /dev/sda
.
However, for “Disk Space” graph you have to specify the volume.
Device is a block device name as it appears in /proc/diskstats
and not
always seeing from df
output especially when logical volumes are in use,
e.g. sda3
, xvda1
, cciss/c0d0p1
. It also can be verified from
lsblk
output. If lsblk
is not available use pvdisplay
from lvm2
package.
Volume is a filesystem absolute path as it appears under the first column of
df
output, e.g. /dev/sda3
, /dev/cciss/c0d0p1
,
/dev/mapper/vglocal01-mysql00
.
Example with logical volumes:
[root@localhost ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vglocal02-root00
271G 5.5G 252G 3% /
tmpfs 127G 0 127G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 243M 32M 199M 14% /boot
/dev/mapper/vglocal02-tmp00
2.0G 68M 1.9G 4% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vglocal01-mysql00
700G 198G 503G 29% /mnt/mysql-fs
[root@localhost ~]# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 278.9G 0 disk
|-sda1 8:1 0 250M 0 part /boot
`-sda2 8:2 0 278.6G 0 part
|-vglocal02-swap00 (dm-0) 253:0 0 2G 0 lvm [SWAP]
|-vglocal02-root00 (dm-1) 253:1 0 274.6G 0 lvm /
`-vglocal02-tmp00 (dm-3) 253:3 0 2G 0 lvm /tmp
sdb 8:16 0 744G 0 disk
`-sdb1 8:17 0 744G 0 part
`-vglocal01-mysql00 (dm-2) 253:2 0 700G 0 lvm /mnt/mysql-fs
Device is sdb1
and volume is /dev/mapper/vglocal01-mysql00
in this
example, if you want to monitor /mnt/mysql-fs.
Sample Graphs¶
The following sample graphs demonstrate how the data is presented.

The number of context switches performed by the server.

The CPU usage. The example shows a server having 1 processor with 2 cores, 4 threads, i.e. 4 virtual CPUs. The values will increase by 100 with each added virtual CPU.

The number of new processes created by the system.

The interrupts the system handles.

The system load average.
If you’re used to Cacti’s standard load average graph, you might think this one has less information. That is not true; the standard graph that comes with Cacti simply shows the same information averaged over three time intervals, which is redundant. RRDTool is natively capable of doing that.

The system’s memory usage.

The number of users that were logged into the system, as reported by the “w” command.

The number of read and write operations completed, and how many reads and writes were merged.

The number of disk sectors read and written.

The amount of time spent reading and writing.

The amount of time spent reading and writing per 1 IO request.

The disk utilization. This graph shows how much time was spent in disk I/O overall (busy time), and how much weighted time was spent doing disk I/O. The latter is a useful indication of I/O backlog. The weighted time is the number of requests multiplied by the busy time, so if there are 5 requests that take 1 second, it is 5 seconds. (If they all happen at the same time, the busy time is only 1 second.)

The number of disk IO operations per second. Actually, this is a sum of reads + writes.

The disk space for the volume.

The swap usage of the system.

The network traffic for the adapter in bits/sec.

The network connection states for the adapter.

The network errors for the adapter.
Contact Us
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