Can't monitor network traffic on VPS

[marc1911]

I've finally Zabbix working on my OpenVZ VPS machines and bumped into the next challange: a network monitoring problem. Why not?

The eth0 interface isn't supported on a VPS. Instead there's at default a venet0 interface available. Probably the parameters to read out receive and transmit values aren't therefore supported in Zabbix. I could of course parse /proc/net/dev and readout the values myself using Bash or Perl.

I did some experimenting with Bash and defined on the Agent two UserParameters that did their job perfectly until their was some shifting with positions of the bytes in the /proc/net/dev output.

UserParameter=venet0.receive, cat /proc/net/dev | grep venet0 | cut -b 9-18
UserParameter=venet0.transmit, cat /proc/net/dev | grep venet0 | cut -b 67-77

Before I throw myself into a new subproject advanced programing with Perl or Bash to get this done, I was wondering if there's someone around that already got over this or a similar problem.

Regards,

Marc

[marc1911]

Ahm..

Found a solution in using Bash with ifconfig:

UserParameter=venet0.transmit, ifconfig venet0 | grep "TX bytes" | cut -d ":" -f 2 | cut -d " " -f 1
UserParameter=venet0.receive, ifconfig venet0 | grep "RX bytes" | cut -d ":" -f 2 | cut -d " " -f 1

[NowVox]

Monitor venet0 with Zabbix

Hi guys,

This is what I'm using with Zabbix 1.4.5 running in an OpenVZ CentOS 5.1 container.

UserParameter=venet0.transmit, /bin/awk '/venet0/ { print $10 }' /proc/net/dev
UserParameter=venet0.receive, /bin/awk '/venet0/ { print $2 }' /proc/net/dev

Works pretty well for me.

[surftimer]

venet0 traffic

Worked for me too with this item

net.if.in[venet0,bytes]

on a container with Debian Lenny

and

UserParameter=venet0.transmit, /usr/bin/awk '/venet0/ { print $10 }' /proc/net/dev
UserParameter=venet0.receive, /usr/bin/awk '/venet0/ { print $2 }' /proc/net/dev

[ittec]

Item?

Hi

thanks by info. But I don't how exactly I have to create a new item for the two UserParameters. Do I need two or one item?

Thanks!

[surftimer]

In this way I have incoming and outgoing traffic ( with both items )
I have never tested it with only one item

I did a clone for the existing item , modified it to my needs and saved the new one.
( I disabled the one I have cloned because it was not supported)

hope this helps

cheers

[ittec]

Doubts

Hi again and thanks to answer.

I still have doubts about monitor traffic with Zabbix on VPS. I work with CentOS 5.

Points:

We request for bytes sended o received throught /proc/net/dev
We use awk to do a kind of grep and cut and separate the information that we wants

Example

-bash-3.2# cat /proc/net/dev

face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
venet0:65638139950 190129610 0 0 0 0 0 0 66277758215 202867072 0 0 0 0 0 0

and inmediatly we do

-bash-3.2# awk '/venet0/ {print $2}' /proc/net/dev

190144023

Perhaps Im wrong but I have the feeling that Im requesting about paquets and not bytes.

First quest did on venet0 190129610 paquets and awk returns 190144023 so with this UserParameter Im recolleting not the Bytes but the paquets!

Do you agree??

Thanks!

[alixen]

We are monitoring OpenVZ VPS and we haven't defined any UserParameter.

We get venet0 traffic data with:
net.if.in[venet0,bytes]
net.if.out[venet0,bytes]

Regards,
Alixen

[ittec]

Curious

Interesting, maybe somebody of forum can explain to us this little mistery

[ittec]

Afirmative

So yes, I have noticed that's no necessary to setup a UserParameter to monitor traffic. Thanks!

[SOaD!]

Interesting, maybe somebody of forum can explain to us this little mistery

The UserParameter is defined as venet0.transmit, and the item parameter is venet0.

Actually Zabbix is using the built-in function with the venet0 parameter and the UserParameter is never used here.