watch-mimedefang - Keep an eye on mimedefang-multiplexor
SYNOPSIS
watch-mimedefang [options]
DESCRIPTION
watch-mimedefang is a Tk script which graphically displays the status
of mimedefang-multiplexor(8). Note that Tcl/Tk 8.0 or higher is
required to run watch-mimedefang.
DISPLAY
watch-mimedefang's display is divided into three main areas, from
top to bottom:
o
The graph display shows six graphs representing various statistics about
the multiplexor.
o
The control area shows the maximum number of slaves, number of busy slaves,
and number of idle slaves. The "Control Command" text entry lets you
monitor remote MIMEDefang servers; see "REMOTE MONITORING" for details.
The "10s", "1m", "5m" and "10m" checkboxes allow you to enable or disable
the graphing of statistics averaged over the last 10 seconds, 1 minute,
5 minutes and 10 minutes.
The "Reread Filters" button forces the multiplexor to reread filter rules.
The "Quit" button terminates watch-mimedefang.
o
The scale at the bottom lets you change the update interval (default 500ms).
Be aware that frequent updating may make watch-mimedefang consume
a significant fraction of CPU time.
THE GRAPH AREA
The graph area contains six graphs:
o Busy Slaves
This graph shows the number of busy slaves each time the statistics are
sampled.
o Slaves/scan
This graph shows the average number of busy slaves each time a message was
scanned. The red plot shows the average over the last ten seconds, the
blue plot shows the average over the last minute, and the green and yellow
plots show the average over the last five and ten minutes, respectively.
o Latency (ms)
This graph shows the average time taken by each SCAN command over the
last ten seconds, one minute, five minutes and ten minutes.
o Messages/s
This graph shows the average number of messages per second that were scanned.
o Activations/s
This graph shows the average number of new slaves activated per second.
o Reaps/s
This graph shows the average number of slaves that have terminated per
second.
If the Activations and Reaps increase significantly, it could indicate
heavy load, or an error causing filters to terminate abnormally.
If only Activations increase, then it probably indicates a sudden increase
in e-mail volume.
If only Reaps increase, then it probably indicates a quiet time just after
a period of heavy mail volume.
You can enable or disable the ten second, one minute, five minute or
ten minute plots by clicking on the "10s", "1m", "5m" or "10m" checkbox.
REMOTE MONITORING
Running watch-mimedefang on your actual mail server poses two problems:
You need Tcl/Tk and the X client libraries installed, and the CPU consumption
of watch-mimedefang can be considerable.
A better method is to run watch-mimedefang on a desktop machine,
but have it monitor the mail server with a remote session.
The best way to establish a remote session is via SSH. For example,
if you are running MIMEDefang on "mail.mydomain.net", you can type
the following into the Control Command entry box and press enter:
ssh root@mail.mydomain.net md-mx-ctrl
You must have a public/private key for the target machine and you
must be running ssh-agent or equivalent; you cannot use an ssh command
that requires entry of a password or passphrase.
Assuming your SSH setup is correct, watch-mimedefang will open
an SSH connection to mail.mydomain.net and exchange low-bandwith information
over that session for monitoring purposes.
COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS
watch-mimedefang accepts the following command-line options:
-command cmd
Use cmd as the control command. You may need to quote cmd
-interval msec
Set the update interval to msec milliseconds.
-10s flag
Enable the "10s" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it if
flag is 0.
-1m flag
Enable the "1m" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it if
flag is 0.
-5m flag
Enable the "5m" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it if
flag is 0.
-10m flag
Enable the "10m" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it if
flag is 0.
-title string
Add string to the title of the main window.
-help
Print usage information.
EXAMPLE
As an example, to monitor MIMEDefang on the machine "mail.mydomain.net"
updating once a second, with the 5m and 10m plots turned off, use:
watch-mimedefang was written by David F. Skoll <dfs@roaringpenguin.com>.
The mimedefang home page is http://www.mimedefang.org/.
PERMISSIONS
watch-mimedefang uses md-mx-ctrl; therefore, it probably
needs to be run as root or the same user as mimedefang-multiplexor,
or (if you are monitoring a remote machine), the SSH connection must be done
as root or the MIMEDefang user.