Fail2ban

Plugin: go.d.plugin Module: fail2ban

Overview

This collector tracks two main metrics for each jail: currently banned IPs and active failure incidents. It relies on the fail2ban-client CLI tool but avoids directly executing the binary. Instead, it utilizes ndsudo, a Netdata helper specifically designed to run privileged commands securely within the Netdata environment. This approach eliminates the need to use sudo, improving security and potentially simplifying permission management.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector only supports collecting metrics from a single instance of this integration.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

This integration doesn't support auto-detection.

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per jail

These metrics refer to the Jail.

Labels:

Label	Description
jail	Jail's name

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
fail2ban.jail_banned_ips	banned	addresses
fail2ban.jail_active_failures	active_failures	failures

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is go.d/fail2ban.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config go.d/fail2ban.conf

Options

The following options can be defined globally: update_every.

Config options

Name	Description	Default	Required
update_every	Data collection frequency.	10	no
timeout	fail2ban-client binary execution timeout.	2	no

Examples

Custom update_every

Allows you to override the default data collection interval.

Config

jobs:
  - name: fail2ban
    update_every: 5  # Collect Fail2Ban jails statistics every 5 seconds

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the fail2ban collector, run the go.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

• Navigate to the plugins.d directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the plugins setting under [directories].

  cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/

• Switch to the netdata user.

  sudo -u netdata -s

• Run the go.d.plugin to debug the collector:

  ./go.d.plugin -d -m fail2ban