How to Monitor Ports and Services with MonitorIX on CentOS 6

MonitorIX

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

MonitorIX can be used to monitor network traffic and system usage to diagnose problems or view system 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 monitor anything from email statistics and disk usage to hardware temperatures and 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 the 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 the config, you can change settings such as titles, the port on which MonitorIX runs, and enable certain graphs under <graph_enable>, and 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.