Preface

This guide is the official documentation of Munin. It has been written by the Munin developers and other volunteers in parallel to the development of the Munin software. It aims to describe all the functionality that the current version of Munin officially supports.

To make the large amount of information about Munin manageable, this guide has been organized in several parts. Each part is targeted at a different class of users, or at users in different stages of their Munin experience. It is nevertheless still designed to be read as a book, sequentially, for the 3 first parts.

Further parts can be read in a more random manner, as one will search for a specific thing in it. Extensive care has been taken to fully leverage the hyperlinking abilities of modern documentation readers.

Preface

This is the part you are currently reading.

It focus on very generic information about Munin, and also gives some guidelines on how to interact with the Munin ecosystem.

Every Munin user should read this.

Part I - Tutorial

This part is an informal introduction for new users. It will try to cover most of what a user is expected to know about Munin. The focus here is really about taking the user by the hand and showing him around, while getting his hands a little wet.

Every Munin user should read this.

Part II - Architecture

This part documents the various syntax that are used all throughout Munin. It is about every thing a normal user can look himself without being considered as a developer. It means the syntax of the various config files, and the protocol on the network.

Every Munin user should read this.

Part III - Install

This part describes the installation and administration of the server. It is about the OS part of Munin, which would be UID, path for the various components, how upgrades should be handled. It is also about how Munin interacts with its environment, such as how to secure a Munin install [1], how to enhance the performance of it.

Everyone who runs a Munin server, be it for private use or for others, should read this part.

Part IV - API

This part describes the programming interfaces for Munin for advanced users, such as the SQL schema of the metadata, or the structure of the spool directories. It should cover everything that isn’t covered by Part II.

Part V - Advanced use

This part contains information for really advanced users about the obscure capabilities of Munin. Topics include undocumented stuff or even unwritten stuff that is still only in RFC phase.

Part VI - Reference

This part contains reference information about Munin commands, client and server programs. This part supports the other parts with structured information sorted by command or program. This also serves as a repository for the full sample configs that are studied in the Part I

Part VII - Others

This part contains assorted information that might be of use to Munin developers. This section serves usually as incubator for elements before they migrate to the previous parts.

Note

If you think that our Guide looks quite familiar, it is done on purpose, as we took a great inspiration of PostgreSQL’s Manual. We even copied some generic sentences that were already very well worded.

In fact, the PostgreSQL project was, and still is, of a great guidance, as it does so many things right. The parts that were imported from PostgreSQL are obviously still under the PostgreSQL license [2].

[1]Even how to configure SELinux with Munin !
[2]We are not license experts, so if a PostgreSQL license guru has some issues with that, we’ll be happy to resolve them together.