asyd’s blog

At my work, we currently use nagios and cacti for monitoring, the “standard” tools. However, why it’s difficult to replace nagios – for many reasons (it use standard flat configuration flies) – I’m looking for a way to replace Cacti. Indeed, it’s written in pure PHP, there is almost no CLI. So, when I add a new host, I need to use my browser, and my mouse, and I don’t like that. By chance, a friend of mine wrote his own tool, called JRDS, in pure Java. I’m actually in test phase, however, here are some pros:

• It’s Java, no need for php, whatever.
• JRDS use rrd4j, RRDTool Java implementation
• Use flat files for configuration, so it’s very easy to manage

However, one of its wort cons i s the lack of documentation! So here some notes to build JRDS :

1. Fetch and extract JRDS sources from the subversion repository
2. Fetch and extract RRD4j sources from the subversion repository (note: a dev.java.net account seem to be required)
3. Build RRD4j
   • # cd rrd4j/rrd4j
   • # ant
   • # cp rrd4j-<version>.jar $JRDS_HOME/trunk/lib
4. Build JRDS
   • If you don’t have it, download ivy and copy its jar in ~/.ant/lib directory
   • # cd $JRDS_HOME/trunk
   • # ant resolve
   • Extrat c.tld from lib/standard.jar and copy the file in the lib/ directory ( # unzip lib/standard.jar META-INF/c.tld ; mv META-INF/c.tld lib/ ; rmdir META-INF
   • # cp local.properties.sample local.properties
   • Edit local.properties, don’t forget to set jai.home at the end of file
   • # ant war
5. Before deploy jrds.war, you need to create a properties file, and some directories. See the inital setup chapter of JRDS Userguide.
6. Note: to deploy JRDS on Glassfish, the only way I found to create the property is to defined in the JVM options. I also have sometimes a deadlock, if that appears, you need to kill the Glassfish process and restart it.

jrds.properties

configdir=/Users/bbonfils/tools/jrds/config
rrddir=/Users/bbonfils/tools/jrds/probe
logfile=/Users/bbonfils/tools/jrds/log/jrds.log
libspath=/Users/bbonfils/sources/jrds/trunk/build/probes.jar
#loglevel=debug

config/host-kaoru.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<host name="kaoru.asyd.net">
        <snmp community="secret" version="2"/>
        <probe type="TcpSnmp" />
        <probe type="IpSnmp" />
        <probe type="UdpSnmp" />
        <probe type="IcmpSnmp" />
        <probe type="MemLinux" />
        <probe type="CpuRawTimeLinux" />
        <probe type="UcdRawSystemCounter" />
        <probe type="PartitionSpace">
                <arg type="String" value="/" />
        </probe>
        <probe type="IfSnmp">
               <arg type="String" value="eth0" />
        </probe>
        <probe type="CpuLoadFloat" />
        <probe type="TcpStat" />
</host>

Java, Sysadmin jrds