Monitoring Varnish with Munin

Varnish is a great reverse proxy and very useful for load balancing. Here you can find a tutorial on installing Varnish: Installing and configuring Varnish HTTP accelerator.

Munin is a network/system monitoring application that presents output in graphs through a web interface. If you haven’t installed it already, use this tutorial: Monitoring multiple servers with Munin.

Assuming you have both varnish and munin installed, here’s a tutorial on installing a plugin for munin to monitor Varnish.

1. Install git-core to receive the plugin from github

apt-get install git-core


2. cd into the munin plugins directory

/usr/share/munin/plugins


3. Download the munin-varnish plugin

git clone git://github.com/basiszwo/munin-varnish.git


4. Set correct permissions

chmod a+x /usr/share/munin/plugins/munin-varnish/varnish_*


5. Link the plugin sections to the munin config

ln -s /usr/share/munin/plugins/munin-varnish/varnish_* /etc/munin/plugins/


6. Add these lines to the bottom of the munin-node config (pico /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node)

[varnish*]
user root


7. Restart munin-node

/etc/init.d/munin-node restart