Exim

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: exim

Overview

This collector monitors Exim mail queue.

It uses the exim command line binary to get the statistics.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

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

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

Assuming setup prerequisites are met, the collector will try to gather statistics using the method described above, even without any configuration.

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 Exim instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
exim.qemails	emails	emails

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

Exim configuration - local installation

The module uses the exim binary, which can only be executed as root by default. We need to allow other users to exim binary. We solve that adding queue_list_requires_admin statement in exim configuration and set to false, because it is true by default. On many Linux distributions, the default location of exim configuration is in /etc/exim.conf.

1. Edit the exim configuration with your preferred editor and add: queue_list_requires_admin = false
2. Restart exim and Netdata

Exim configuration - WHM (CPanel) server

On a WHM server, you can reconfigure exim over the WHM interface with the following steps.

1. Login to WHM
2. Navigate to Service Configuration --> Exim Configuration Manager --> tab Advanced Editor
3. Scroll down to the button Add additional configuration setting and click on it.
4. In the new dropdown which will appear above we need to find and choose: queue_list_requires_admin and set to false
5. Scroll to the end and click the Save button.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is python.d/exim.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 python.d/exim.conf

Options

There are 2 sections:

• Global variables
• One or more JOBS that can define multiple different instances to monitor.

The following options can be defined globally: priority, penalty, autodetection_retry, update_every, but can also be defined per JOB to override the global values.

Additionally, the following collapsed table contains all the options that can be configured inside a JOB definition.

Every configuration JOB starts with a job_name value which will appear in the dashboard, unless a name parameter is specified.

Config options

Name	Description	Default	Required
update_every	Sets the default data collection frequency.		False
priority	Controls the order of charts at the netdata dashboard.		False
autodetection_retry	Sets the job re-check interval in seconds.		False
penalty	Indicates whether to apply penalty to update_every in case of failures.		False
name	Job name. This value will overwrite the job_name value. JOBS with the same name are mutually exclusive. Only one of them will be allowed running at any time. This allows autodetection to try several alternatives and pick the one that works.		False
command	Path and command to the exim binary		False

Examples

Local exim install

A basic local exim install

local:
 command: 'exim -bpc'

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the exim collector, run the python.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 python.d.plugin to debug the collector:

  ./python.d.plugin exim debug trace