sysgr

This is a simple tool which should work out of the box to create system state diagrams such as CPU load, disk usage, network stats, and so on. It sources further simple scripts (found in rrdscripts/) which actually collect the data of the system. Furthermore it is very easy to add own data collectors without fiddling with rrdtool.

If you want to have a quick and easy solution to get a graphical display about the health of your server(s) than this script is your friend!

How To Use

It depends on rrdtool, thus install the package rrdtool first (e.g. with apt-get).

Download everything from this directory, i.e. sysgr and the rrdscripts directory.

git clone https://github.com/rahra/sysgr

Change into the directory and run ./sysgr. It will create the directory var where all charts are place.

It is suggested to be run from cron. Thus, 1st create a config file .sysgr.conf in $HOME and add the following two lines and modify appropriately:

RRDHOME=/var/www/apache24/stats/rrd
RRDSCRIPTS=<path_to_your>/rrdscripts

Now edit your crontab with crontab -e and add the following line:

*/5 * * * * <path_to_your_git_clone>/sysgr

Adding Own Collectors

As an example we'd like to monitor the total number of running processes.

Create a shell script in rrdscripts/. The file shall have the extension .sh. In this case the file is named rrdscripts/nprocs.sh

The file basically shall export at least the variable RRDDATA containing the data in the following format:

RRDDATA=var1name:var1data [var2name:var2data [ ... ] ]

Our example shell script counts the total number of processes:

RRDDATA=nprocs:$(ps uax | wc -l | tr -d \  )

ps uax lists all processes one on each line, wc -l counts the number of lines and outputs the value, tr -d \ eliminates whitespaces in the string.

The following environment variables can optionally be set by the collector scripts:

RRDOPTIONS=

This is passed directly as options to the rrdtool and can contain any valid rrdtool options.

RRDVTYPE=

This variable defines the type of the variable(s) according to the rrdtool. This is either GAUGE which is default or COUNTER. GAUGE is used if the variable is an absolute value, e.g. such as the system load. COUNTER is used if the variable is an ever increasing value, e.g. the number of bytes transmitted on a network interface.

RRDVLABEL=

This sets the label on the vertical (y) axis of the diagram. By default the name of the script is used.