Further Information

Besides the official documentation, that is this guide, there are many other resources about Munin.

The fact that info is scattered around makes it sometimes difficult to find relevant one. Each source has its purpose, and is usually only well-suited for some kind of documentation.

Munin Guide

These are the pages you are currently reading. It is aimed at the first read. The chapters are designed as a walk-through of Munin’s components in a very guided manner. Its read constitutes the basis of every documentation available. Specially when asking live (IRC, mailing-lists) channels, users there will expect that you read the Guide prior to asking.

It is regularly updated, as its sources are directly in the munin source directory, the last version can always be accessed online at http://guide.munin-monitoring.org/ thanks to ReadTheDoc.

It is specially designed for easy contribution and distribution thanks to Sphinx. That aspect will be handled in Contributing.

Web

The Munin web site is the other main source of information. It has a wiki format, but as spammers have become lately very clever, all content is now added by registered users only.

Information there has the tendency of being rather extensive, but old. This is mostly due to the fact that it was the first and only way of documenting Munin. So in case there is conflicting information on the wiki and on the Guide, better trust the Guide. We are obviously very glad if you can pinpoint the conflicting infos so we can correct the wrong one.

Still, a very important part is the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), which contains many answers to a wide array of questions. It is the only part of the documentation in the wiki that is still regularly updated.

GitHub

The Munin GitHub has slowly become the center of all the community-driven development. It is a very solid platform, and despites its drawback of delegation of control, given the importance it has today, no-one can ignore it. The mere fact that we opened a presence there has increased the amount of small contributions by an order of magnitude. Given that those are the meat of a global improvement, it ranked as a success.

Main Repository

Therefore, we will move more and more services to cloud platforms as GitHub, as it enables us to focus on delivering software and not caring about so much infrastructure.

We already moved all code pull requests there, and new issues should be opened there also. We obviously still accept any contribution by other means, such a email, but as we couldn’t resist the move from SVN to GIT, we are moving from our Trac to GitHub.

Contrib Repository

The contrib part is even more live than before. It has very successfully replaced the old MuninExchange site. Now, together with the Plugin Gallery it offer all the useful features the old site offered, and is much easier to contribute to. It also ease the integration work, and therefore shortens the time it takes for your contributions to be reviewed and merged.

Mailing Lists

If you don’t find a specific answer to your question in the various documentations, the mailing lists are a very good place to have your questions shared with other users.

Please also consult the list archives. Your Munin issue may have been discussed already.

It happens that they were much more used in the previous years, but nowadays it is much more common to seek an immediate answer on a specific issue, which is best handled by IRC. Therefore the mailing lists do appear very quiet, as most users go on other channels.

IRC

The most immediate way to get hold of us is to join our IRC channel:

#munin on server irc.oftc.net

The main timezone of the channel is Europe+America.

If you can explain your problem in a few clear sentences, without too much copy&paste, IRC is a good way to try to get help. If you do need to paste log files, configuration snippets, scripts and so on, please use a pastebin.

If the channel is all quiet, try again some time later, we do have lives, families and jobs to deal with also.

You are more than welcome to just hang out, and while we don’t mind the occasional intrusion of the real world into the flow, keep it mostly on topic, and don’t paste random links unless they are really spectacular and intelligent.

Note that m-r-b is our beloved munin-relay-bot that bridges the #munin channel on various IRC networks, such as Freenode.

Yourself!

Munin is an open-source project.

As such, it depends on the user community for ongoing support. As you begin to use Munin, you will rely on others for help, either through the documentation or through the mailing lists. Consider contributing your knowledge back. Read the mailing lists and answer questions.

If you learn something which is not in the documentation, write it up and contribute it. If you add features to the code, contribute them.

Planet Munin

In order to provide some central place to reference munin-related blogs out there, Planet Munin was created.

It aggregates many blogs via RSS, and presents them as just one feed.

To add your blog, just visit us on our IRC Channel, and ask there.

Note that providing a tagged or a category-filtered feed is the best way to remain on-topic.