How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

[Gareth]

You can still use Nagios. You just need to decide exactly what you want
to monitor.

For example look at the incoming mail queue and the date of the oldest
file. If it is <5 minutes or so then you can assume it is working.
If it is over 5 minutes then there could be a problem so check the sql
database (assuming you are using mailwatch) to see if there have been
any mails processed in last few minutes. If so then we just have a
backlog otherwise something isn't working so alert.

On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 12:06, Jonas A. Larsen wrote:
> Hi Alistair and Gareth too.
> 
>  
> 
> I have used nagios for many years. However if you read my mail again,
> I specifically don’t need to know the queue size or the status of the
> MTA, none of those can give you a definitive answer about whether or
> not mail flow is working, I need something that can check if mail is
> flowing and if its delayed.
> 
>  
> 
> 
> /Jonas
> 
>  
> 
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info
> [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of
> Alistair Carmichael
> Sent: 9. juli 2007 12:31
> To: MailScanner discussion
> Subject: RE: How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture
> 
> 
>  
> 
> Hi,
> 
> The monitoring software I use - nagios is capable of this, without
> going into too much detail its basically a monitoring tool that can
> run on a webserver and then check the status of software such as your
> mta remotely aswell as executing local scripts on each mailscanner
> server to check queue sizes and report back to the nagios monitoring
> server via the nagios nrpe plugin, which can be configured to alert
> via email or even sms once certain thresholds (e.g queue size) are
> met. 
> 
> In our setup I wrote my own queue size monitor script but there are
> nrpe scripts already created for various MTA’s out there.
> 
>  
> 
> Al
> 
>  
> 
>                                    
> ______________________________________________________________________
> 
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info
> [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Jonas
> A. Larsen
> Sent: 09 July 2007 11:04
> To: mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
> Subject: How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture
> 
> 
>  
> 
> Hello all
> 
>  
> 
> I have a problem, and discussing it on the irc channel didn’t turn up
> any obvious solution.
> 
>  
> 
> Say you have more than 1 MS box scanning mails for a specific domain.
> They are load balanced in some way, so the load is split over the
> servers.
> 
>  
> 
> Now lets say one of the servers have a problem. Not a fatal problem,
> so the server is still running (responds to pings etc) port 25 is
> still open, and exim (the mta in my case) still accepts mails.
> 
>  
> 
> But for some reason, crash, corrupt config, full root fs etc. the
> process of moving mails from the incoming queue to the outgoing queue
> is not working.
> 
>  
> 
> What I am interested in, is a system to alert me of such a problem
> automatically.
> 
>  
> 
> Currently the only thing, besides clients noticing mail being delayed,
> is for me to look at my mailscaner-mrtg graphs for the incoming queue
> and notice that its growing.
> 
>  
> 
> One method of doing all this automatically that we came up with, would
> be some complex system that would work as follows:
> 
>  
> 
> You create a domain for each MailScanner, that only that MailScanner
> scans for.
> 
>  
> 
> You then create an imap account on another system for each of the
> domains.
> 
>  
> 
> You then create a script that sends a mail to each of the accounts and
> after X amount of minutes check to see if the mail has arrived on the
> imap account. If yes, delete the mail and do the same thing again
> after Y amount of minutes (a cron job), if it doesn’t exist something
> must be wrong with the mailflow, either its interrupted or is
> experiencing delays.
> 
>  
> 
> Do anybody have a better idea or know of something that can do this
> already?
> 
>  
> 
> My root file system ran full last week, and it caused mails to still
> be accepted (incoming is on /var on another disk) but MS was frozen
> because it couldn’t extract attachments to /tmp which was full because
> it was on the same disk as the root fs.
> 
>  
> 
> I hope I have made the above somewhat clear, if not please ask me to
> clarify.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Med venlig hilsen / Best regards
> 
>  
> 
> Jonas Akrouh Larsen
> 
>  
> 
> TechBiz ApS
> 
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> 
>  
> 
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