[Xymon] Xymon script for linux

[Bruce Ferrell]

On 9/22/19 6:31 PM, Jeremy Laidman wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Sep 2019 at 10:30, Bruce Ferrell <bferrell at baywinds.org <mailto:bferrell at baywinds.org>> wrote:
>
>
>     I'm curious how you propose actually using sar data in a client message.  On my system /var/log/sa is 44M of text data.
>
>
> Yeah, I could have been clearer in describing what I had in mind.
>
>
>     vmstat (procps) is already used and feeds rrd on the server via the client message; which is a MUCH more compact, long term storage format (The rrds for the same system are
>     only 13M).
>
>
> If "sar [some options]" can produce equivalent output to (say) "vmstat 300 2", then it's likely to take the same amount of storage and bytes transmitted. But it has the added 
> benefit that the same sar output from Solaris and AIX and Linux can all be parsed by the same code on the Xymon server. So the one client-side command to create [vmstat] in the 
> client message will be universal across a wide range of OSes. If we can replace [vmstat] in this way, we may be able to do the same for  [netstat] and [iostat] and a few others 
> (by using sar with other options). We might also introduce an equivalent to [iostatdisk] and other things that don't yet exist in some OSes' client messages.
>
Interesting idea... but sa doesn't work like that at all.

sar can collect individualized sets of stats, but the default the cron jobs that come in the sysstat package run sa to collect all system stats at "cron interval". Then it has to 
be sliced and diced after the fact.... It's semi non-trivial to extract "just the latest update changes for the stat set you want" to transmit the the server.  Not that it can't be 
done, but it's a pain.

SO "just drop sar on... " become "just drop sar and modify it's defaults".  If sar is already there and I'm the admin, I'm going to be a wee touch miffed if someone messes with my 
system wide, long term stats collection or creates a duplicate, parallel, space gobbling collection dataset at the client.

vm/io/whatever stat collects a sample and sends just that sample. All storage is at the xymon server  MUCH cleaner even if adding the rare/exotic new thing is harder when they come 
up.  BTW, sar on OS X is a way different beast too, so it violates the premise that the same code works.  but *stat works out of the box.

I've not checked other *BSD variants... Yet.


>  Adding support for a new OS (eg an exotic Linux-based NAS) becomes much easier if a "sar" package can be installed, or binaries for "sa" and "sar".can be copied onto the device.
>
>
>     The perennially discussed issues around parsing iproute2 output are kind of well cpovered so we'll let that be... And no, SUSE hasn't removed net-tools.  It's just not
>     installed in
>     a very minimal install.
>
>
>
>     On 9/19/19 7:53 PM, Jeremy Laidman wrote:
>     > Would it be difficult to have the server-side linux parser look for [ports] and if not found, then look for [ss]; and similarly, [ifconfig] has [ip-addr] as its fallback
>     > (assuming "ip addr show" gives similar output - probably doesn't, but you get the idea)?
>     >
>     > Minorly tangential, I think sar is more universally available these days than when the client scripts were first created. So I'm wondering if we should make better use of sar,
>     > perhaps even have a [sar] section of the client message, that is the first place that xymond goes when looking for statistics.
>     >
>     > On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 at 00:52, Japheth Cleaver <cleaver at terabithia.org <mailto:cleaver at terabithia.org> <mailto:cleaver at terabithia.org <mailto:cleaver at terabithia.org>>> wrote:
>     >
>     >     On 9/18/2019 8:05 AM, Zdeněk Tlustý wrote:
>     >     > Hello,
>     >     >
>     >     > the script xymonclient-linux.sh is using commands like ifconfig,
>     >     > netstat, etc. These commands are marked as depreciated and some of the
>     >     > Linux distributions have removed them already. For example SuSE Linux
>     >     > Enterprise Server 15 has no support for netstat and ifconfig.
>     >     > The replacement are commands from iproute2 package like ip, ss,
>     >     > routel, etc.
>     >     > Are there any plan to replace depreciated commands with new ones?
>     >
>     >
>     >     Especially with SS and IP, it's something that's on the road map.
>     >     Unfortunately, doing that in a backwards-compatible way will still
>     >     keeping the 'linux' OStype/class 'linux' might prove difficult without a
>     >     lot more text processing. (This flag is split on the receiving side for
>     >     parsing out what client evaluations to run and how, since the output of
>     >     SunOS, Linux, BSDs, and other *nixes can vary widely.)
>     >
>     >     One could either move current OS's to something like "linux-old", or
>     >     have upgraded scripts under "linux-new", or do a lot of 'awk' calls in
>     >     xymonclient-linux.sh to try to duplicate previous output more precisely.
>     >     I'm not sure which is better there.
>     >
>     >     Regards,
>     >     -jc
>     >
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