DeutschEnglish

Submenu

- - - By CrazyStat - - -

30. January 2013

Nagios / Icinga: Monitor (local) memory usage

Filed under: Linux,Server Administration — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 17:55

Nagios and its fork icinga are great monitoring tools. They come with a bundle of plugins to monitor standard services such as HTTP, SMTP, POP3, load and stuff like that. And there are lots of 3rd party plugins available for almost everything else you can think of.

But one standard thing that is missing in the official nagios-plugins package is a plugin to check memory usage (of the local machine).

So here is how to install one. I assume a Debian system with Icinga running – you might want to adjust paths for other distros or nagios.

  1. Download the plugin here
    e.g. from the shell:

    wget https://exchange.icinga.com/exchange/check_memory/files/784/check_memory.pl
  2. Then move the file to the other plugins 
    mv check_memory.pl /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_memory.pl
  3. Make it executable 
    chmod +x /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_memory.pl
  4. Try to run it: 
    perl /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_memory.pl -w 50% -c 25%
  5. This should give something like “CHECK_MEMORY OK – […] free […]”. If an error occurs, you probably need to install the perl module Nagios::Plugin. On Debian, the easiest way is: 
    apt-get install libnagios-plugin-perl

    On other distros, you might use CPAN:

    perl -MCPAN -e 'install Nagios::Plugin'

    This will ask you lots of questions and install lots of dependencies (where you should say “yes”).

  6. Configure the check_memory command. To do this, create a file /etc/nagios-plugins/config/memory.cfg with this content: 
    # 'check_memory' command definition
define command{
        command_name    check_memory
        command_line    perl /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_memory.pl -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$
        }
  7. Now you can use the check_memory command to define a service. For example, add this to /etc/icinga/objects/localhost_icinga.cfg (assuming you define localhost-services there): 
    define service{
        use                             generic-service
        host_name                       localhost
        service_description             Memory
        check_command                   check_memory!50%!25%
        }

    This will send you a warning when memory usage is 50% and critical when only 25% is free. You might want to adjust these values of course depending on what is normal on your system and how early you want to be notified.

  8. Check your configuration: 
    /usr/local/icinga/bin/icinga -v /etc/icinga/icinga.cfg
  9. Restart Icinga / Nagios if the preflight-check was okay: 
    /etc/init.d/icinga restart

This should be it.

I hope this helped somebody.

To monitor memory usage of a remote server, you’ll need SNMP for example. Maybe I’ll post another blog post on this soon.

Recommendation

Try my Open Source PHP visitor analytics script CrazyStat.

14. August 2012

MySQL: How to do a (simple/complex) CHECK CONSTRAINT?

Filed under: DBMS — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 02:27

Another “badly-missing-feature”-post. I should create a category for that I guess…

Usually, you can add a constraint to a table in SQL with something like:

ALTER TABLE foo ADD CONSTRAINT my_constraint CHECK (bla<>0)

Some sites like w3school even tell you this is the syntax for it in MySQL. Well, I guess they have never tried this and not even read the manual. Well, you can execute it in MySQL without an error. But also without any effect whatsoever. I tried it in InnoDB (MySQL 5.5) and it did not check the constraint at all.

The MySQL manual says:

The CHECK clause is parsed but ignored by all storage engines

Hallelujah, MySQL is great. A bug request for that exists since 2004, so don’t expect it to be fixed soon…

So we go with a trigger instead. For constraints, we use a BEFORE trigger. So next thing I tried looked something like this:

CREATE TRIGGER check_my_constraint BEFORE UPDATE ON `foo`
     FOR EACH ROW 
     BEGIN 
     IF (NEW.bla=0)
     THEN 
     ROLLBACK;
     END IF; 
     END

Should work, but doesn’t. Problem is that MySQL doesn’t like ROLLBACK here. Hallelujah, MySQL is great. So what worked in the end is sending an error signal:

CREATE TRIGGER check_my_constraint BEFORE UPDATE ON `foo`
     FOR EACH ROW 
     BEGIN 
     DECLARE msg varchar(255);
     IF (NEW.bla=0)
     THEN 
        SET msg = concat('Constraint my_constraint violated: bla must not be zero ', cast(new.bla as char));
        SIGNAL sqlstate '45000' SET message_text = msg;
     END IF; 
     END

Thanks to Rui Da-Costa for the solution with the SIGNAL.

The cool thing about triggers is that you can do complex checks here. So I just used it for something like:

 IF (NEW.ref_id IS NOT NULL AND
     NEW.ref2_id<>(SELECT `ref2_id` FROM `ref` WHERE `ref`.id=NEW.`ref_id`))

So that makes sure that ref_id is either null or it refers to a row in table `ref` with this id that has the same ref2_id as the table we are checking. So a more complex type of foreign key relationship.

Hope this helped somebody to get things solved more quickly. Don’t forget to add an INSERT trigger as well.

Another remark: Make sure you do not use semicolon as delimiter when using SQL/PL syntax. phpMyAdmin has an extra field to change the delimiter (below the textarea where you enter your SQL) for example.

29. February 2012

Windows: Mount VHD-file (virtual hard disk) via Right-Click

Filed under: Windows — Tags: , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 12:18

You might know .vhd-files from Virtual PC or Windows Backup. In case you need to access a file from such a virtual hard drive, you can easily mount it in Windows.

It is possible via drive manager, but today I found a solution that is even a lot easier: Just right click a vhd-file and select to mount the file via “send to”.

Here is the tutorial including the necessary batch scripts:

How-To Geek: Mount and Unmount a VHD File in Windows Explorer via a Right-Click

Works great on Windows 7 – not tested any other version.