mrtg VS Munin

Early in my career, in the late 90s, I was at Cox Interactive Media responsible for our web farm which hosted all of Cox Enterprises news sites: newspapers, radio stations, tv stations. This was before the days of SREs and SROs and dev-ops. We were just system admins and programmers and some of us could do both.

Our web farm was about two-dozen Sun Ultra 2s connected on a FDDI loop, with content on NetApps. We had a couple Sun E450s. Apache on the Ultra 2s. Apache + mod_perl on the E450s.

Monitoring with MRTG[1].

It's 1998. The Ken Starr report drops. Now, we knew it was coming, and we did our best to be prepared, but this is the late 90s. There was only so much load testing we could do and didn't really know how much traffic it would drive. We kept the site up, but it meant, as I recall, a lot of fine tuning of the mod_perl box and disabling interactive parts of the site.

I really wish I still had some of the traffic graphs.

Fun times.

[1] Receipt: https://github.com/oetiker/mrtg/blob/master/src/CHANGES#L310...

I rediscovered Munin. To my surprise it is written entirely in Perl. I remember Munin from years ago... it still seems healty and maintained and lies ready on your Deb-Repositories. So I followed the Easy Install Guide... which really is easy, but fails to mention that you need to install your own HTTP-Server to serve the HTML-reports.

A bit of background, which may make understanding my choices in this lib easier: Munin is a resource monitoring tool using rrdtool, usually run in a Server/Client Setup. The client accepts plugins which are just executables in a directory. Usually written in a scripting language, but it actually doesn't matter. Data is fetched every 5 minutes, plugins are first run with a config argument to spit out a munin graph config, followed by a run without arguments to present data. To support higher resolutions than just "every 5 minutes", graph config can contain config to tell munin one collects it every second. Then the fetching part needs to run as a daemon, writing a cache somewhere which gets output when munin wants the data.

Munin plugins and management script for monitoring various Pi-hole® statistics.

When you do not have enough power you would get errors because looking up the plots would simply fail. Sounds more that there is one disk which is slower. I had one 2TB external usb which was really slow and the latency of lookups was through the roof. Are you on linux ? Then install munin-monitoring.org it shows latency of the disks out of the box.

what os ? on linux install https://munin-monitoring.org/ it will give you disk latency information.

I'd say give Munin a try.

Munin plugins for monitoring Pi-hole®. Transforms a server into a powerful monitoring platform, as simple as one, two, three, ...four.