Installing Munin¶
With open source software, you can choose to install binary packages or install from source-code. To install a package or install from source is a matter of personal taste. If you don’t know which method too choose read the whole document and choose the method you are most comfortable with.
Master and node¶
Munin is split into two distinct roles.
Node¶
The “munin node” is a daemon which runs on all servers being monitored.
Master¶
The “munin master” connects to all munin nodes, collects data, and stores it in RRD
You will need to install “munin-master” on the server which will collect data from all nodes, and graph the results. When starting with munin, it should be enough to install the munin master on one server.
On the munin master, you will need a web server capable of running CGI or FastCGI. Apache HTTD should be suitable. Also reported to be working is nginx and lighttpd.
Source or packages?¶
Installing Munin on most relevant operating systems can usually be done with with the systems package manager, typical examples being:
FreeBSD¶
From source:
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/munin-master && make install clean
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/munin-node && make install clean
Binary packages:
pkg_add -r munin-master
pkg_add -r munin-node
Debian/Ubuntu¶
Munin is distributed with both Debian and Ubuntu.
In order to get Munin up and running type
sudo apt-get install munin-node
on all nodes, and
sudo apt-get install munin
on the master.
Please note that this might not be the latest version of Munin. On Debian you have the option of enabling “backports”, which may give access to later versions of Munin.
RedHat / CentOS / Fedora¶
At time of writing, only the 1.x version of munin is available in EPEL.
If you want 2.x, your best option is probably to install from source.
Other systems¶
On other systems, you are probably best off compiling your own code. See Installing Munin from source.
Installing Munin from source¶
If there are no binary packages available for your system, or if you want to install Munin from source for other reasons, follow these steps:
We recommend downloading a release tarball, which you can find on sourceforge.net.
Alternatively, if you want to hack on Munin, you should clone our git repository by doing.
git clone git://github.com/munin-monitoring/munin
Please note that a git checkout will need some more build-dependencies than listed below, in particular the Python Docutils and Sphinx.
Build dependencies on Debian / Ubuntu¶
In order to build Munin from source you need a number of packages installed. On a Debian or Ubuntu system these are:
- perl
- htmldoc
- html2text
- default-jdk
Configuring and installing¶
Warning for NFS users¶
If you’re using NFS please note that the “make install” process is slightly problematic in that it (Module::Build actually) writes files under $CWD. Since “make install” is usually run by root and root usually cannot write files on a NFS volume, this will fail. If you use NFS please install munin from /var/tmp, /tmp or some such to work around this.
Running make¶
There are make targets for node, master, documentation and man files. Generally you want to install everything on the master, and just the node and plugiuns on the nodes.
Edit Makefile.config to suit your needs.
Create the user “munin” with the primary group “munin”.
The user needs no shell and no privileges. On most Linux systems the munin user’s shell is the nologin shell (it has different paths on different systems - but the user still needs to be able to run cron jobs.
Node¶
For the node, you need only the common parts, the node and the plugins.
make
make install-common-prime install-node-prime install-plugins-prime