Munin offers a number of options to control the appearance and style of the graphs it generates.
One is how the data is drawn on the graph.
What the documentation doesn’t currently do is show you visually how these different options render. So we thought we’d do that.
One of the annoyances we find with using Munin is writing plugins. It’s not hard or complicated per se (or any worse than with any of the other monitoring tools). However it often seems confusing and fiddly to our little brains. We’ll admit we aren’t Munin Experts, nor want to be.
The implementation details we do know tend to leak out of our heads over time as, although we use the reports frequently, we typically don’t fiddle with the guts of Munin very often. Which is perhaps a good thing.
Yet from time to time we need to tinker and it is mostly with the plugins.
This is a “quick start” to installing munin on a set of Debian / Ubuntu based servers.It covers just enough to get you started … check the munin documentation for additional things you might want to do.
One of the clever things Munin can do is just guess the correct scale for your graphs. It will dynamically adjust the y axis depending on the data it’s graphing.Sadly, it doesn’t always do such a great job of being smart. And un-breaking this smartness proves not to be as easy as you might hope … but it can be done.
