Install Munin (Network Monitoring) in RHEL, CentOS and Fedora

In this basic guide we will describe and show you how to install and configure Munin ( Network Monitoring Tool ) with Munin Node in RHEL 6.3/6.2/6.1/6/5.8, CentOS6.3/6.2/6.1/6/5.8 and Fedora 12,13,14,15,16,17 systems using EPEL repositories with Yumtool. I have personally tested this installation in one of our server using CentOS 5.6 for monitoring purpose.

Munin Network Monitoring

What Is Munin?

Munin is an open source web based network monitoring application written in Perl that displays systems and networks output in graphs using RRDtool. With the help of Munin you can monitor the performance of your systems, networks, SANS’s and applications. It has amaster/node architecture where master connects to each node regularly and pulls the data from them. It then uses RRDtool to log and generate updated graphs.

Installing Munin in RHEL, CentOS & Fedora

Installing Munin is very simple, just follow my below step-by-step commands to install it on your server.

Step 1: Installing EPEL Repository for RHEL & CentOS

Munin can be installed by using Fedora‘s EPEL repository under RHEL 6.3/6.2/6.1/6/5.8and CentOS 6.3/6.2/6.1/6/5.8. Just, run the following commands as root user to install it using wget.

RHEL/CentOS 6

# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

RHEL/CentOS 5

# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Note : Fedora users don’t need to install EPEL repository, because munin is included in Fedoraand can be installed using yum.

Step 2: Installing Munin

Just run the following command as root user.

# yum --enablerepo=epel -y install munin munin-node

By default the above installation creates following directories.

1. /etc/munin/munin.conf : Munin master configuration file.
2. /etc/cron.d/munin : Munin cron file.
3. /etc/httpd/conf.d/munin.conf : Munin Apache configuration file.
4. /var/log/munin : Munin log directory.
5. /var/www/munin : Munin web directory.
6. /etc/munin/munin-node.conf : Munin Node master configuration file.
7. /etc/munin/plugins.conf : Munin plugins configuration file.
8. /etc/rc.d/init.d/munin-node : Munin start-up service daemon.

Step 3: Configuring Munin

Open file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and add the following lines of code at the bottom.

Alias /munin /var/www/munin
<Directory /var/www/munin>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Restart Apache and then create system start-up links for Munin and start it.

# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
# chkconfig --levels 235 munin-node on
# /etc/init.d/munin-node start

Step 4: Accessing Munin Web Interface

Wait for 30 minutes so that Munin can generate graphs and displayed it. To see first output of graphs, open your browser and navigate to http://www.example.com/munin.

For more information and usage please visit at http://munin-monitoring.org/wiki/Documentation.