[Xymon] iostat does not work

[Jeremy Laidman]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 10:02 PM Clark Tony <Tony.Clark at uk.mizuho-sc.com>
wrote:

> No matter what I do I cannot get iostat to report on Hobbit (RHEL clients)
>
Can you describe what you have done?  Are there instructions you've
followed for this?

> I have also followed the documentation and added TRENDS as directed which
> also makes no difference.
>
Are you referring to adding TRENDS:*,iostat to the host entries in
hosts.cfg?  This is necessary but not sufficient.  If you're not getting
RRD files named iostat.*.rrd, then there's nothing to graph on the trends
page.

>From reviewing the source code, I believe that iostat gets its input from
the [iostatdisk] section of the client data.  This is only reported by the
Solaris client.  There doesn't appear to be any support for iostat for any
other OS.

This was discussed a few years ago on this list in this thread:

http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/2014-January/038955.html

The bottom line is that iostat supported in Xymon is only for Solaris, and
only handles the output of the Solaris iostat command.  Adding support for
other OSes would be possible - with some source code changes - but not
trivial.  Each OS would need its own code enhancements.

People have implemented iostat monitoring in other ways with custom
scripts, which you can read about in the thread.

Part of the problem here is that every different OS has a different iostat
command output and parameters, which means OS-specific code needs to be
written on both client and server.  Few people have access to all of the
supported OSes, to ensure a consistent iostat experience.  Personally, I
think all clients should be enhanced to report several [sar] sections into
the client data, including for example [sar-d] (because "sar -d" gives most
of the same details as "iostat -x", and would probably work on most OSes).
Three advantages of using sar are: a) it tends to be much more uniform
across different OSes, which means that the same parsing code can be used
on the Xymon server; b) it is more likely to be present (or available to
install) on a variety of OSes compared with other similar tools, which tend
to be written for one OS and ported to others; c) it has modes for
collecting more different types of instrumentation than most other similar
tools.

J
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