Munin Automatic plugin addition with Puppet

Posted: 2016-03-06 14:40:25 by Alasdair Keyes

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I manage the core of my servers with Puppet and also use Munin for graphing system resources and metrics.

Munin has a lot of built in plugins to record system metrics and on installation will auto-detect what is available on the system to monitor, but it doesn't activate new plugins automatically. For example, I installed Munin Node on a server and then after installing NTP, Munin didn't know to monitor NTP metrics until I updated the plugins with the munin-node-configure command.

To combat this I wrote the following Puppet stanza to do this for me. In essence, it checks if munin-node-configure has detected any new plugins, if so, it just activates them and notifies the munin-node service to reload.

exec { 'add_suggested_munin_checks': 
    path    => [ "/usr/bin", "/usr/sbin", "/sbin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/bin" ],
    command => "munin-node-configure --suggest --shell | grep 'ln -s' | bash",
    onlyif  => "munin-node-configure --suggest --shell | grep 'ln -s'",
    notify  => Service['munin-node'],
}

service { 'munin-node':
    ensure  => 'running',
    enable  => true,
}

If anyone else manages Munin Nodes via Puppet, this could well help you speed up your Munin updates over large estates

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