How to Monitor Ports and Services with MonitorIX on CentOS6

MonitorIX

This article will go over the steps on how to install MonitorIX and configure it to log a custom port, in this case the Minecraft port (25565).

MonitorIX can be used to monitor traffic and system usage to help diagnose problems or simply to view the systems performance.

What is MonitorIX?

Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitor as many services and system resources as possible. It has been created to be used under production Linux/UNIX servers, but due to its simplicity and small size can be used on embedded devices as well.

What can I monitor with it?

MonitorIX can be used to monitor anything from mail statistics, disk usage, hardware temperatures to current traffic on your MySQL or custom defined port.

Follow the steps below to install MonitorIX on CentOS 6.

1. Required Packages

yum install rrdtool rrdtool-perl perl-libwww-perl perl-MailTools perl-MIME-Lite perl-CGI perl-DBI perl-XML-Simple perl-Config-General perl-HTTP-Server-Simple perl-IO-Socket-SSL

Note: if you are unable to install some packages, you may have to enable to EPEL repo:

32-Bit
    wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

64-Bit
    wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Then re-try the installation

2. Install MonitorIX

rpm -ivh http://www.monitorix.org/monitorix-3.6.0-1.noarch.rpm

Note: be sure to check the MonitorIX Downloads page to see if there are new versions

After installation, you can start MonitorIX with

service monitorix start

After installation you can view the graphs at http://YOURSERVER.DOMAIN:8080/monitorix/ or http://YOURSERVERIP:8080/monitorix/

Defining Custom Ports to Monitor

nano /etc/monitorix/monitorix.conf

By reading through the config, you can change settings such as titles, the port in which MonitorIX runs on, enabling certain graphs under <graph_enable> and so much more.

Here is an example of the <port> section to monitor traffic on the Minecraft port (25565):

 PORT graph
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
<port>
        max = 12
        rule = 24000
        list = 25, 21, 80, 22, 110, 139, 3306, 53, 25565, 25565
        <desc>
                25      = SMTP,    tcp, in, 0, 1000
                21      = FTP,     tcp, in, 0, 1000
                80      = HTTP,    tcp, in, 0, 1000
                22      = SSH,     tcp, in, 0, 1000
                110     = POP3,    tcp, in, 0, 1000
                139     = NETBIOS, tcp, in, 0, 1000
                3306    = MYSQL,   tcp, in, 0, 1000
                53      = DNS,     udp, in, 0, 1000
                25565   = MINECRAFT,    tcp, in, 0, 1000
        </desc>
        graphs_per_row = 3
</port>

By changing the max and adding/changing a port on the list = section you can add a new graph to the <desc> section. Make sure you close the document with CTRL+X and then Y to save, followed by ENTER.

Now you can restart the service

service monitorix restart

and view your newly monitored port.