Low volume postfix_mailqueue munin plugin

The original postfix_mailqueue plugin delivered with munin does very well in many aspects. But it has a design related problem: to measure the number of mails per queue (active, incomming, deferred, ...) it counts the entries in the corresponding spool directories every 5 minutes (when munin core asks). If a mail only stays a short time in a queue (especially active and incomming queues) it won't get recognized by postfix_mailqueue.

Since on my low volume mailserver I'm interested in the total number of sent/ recieved messages in the last 5 minutes (for the deferred and hold queues the original method is good enough since a mail there probably stays longer than 5 minutes) I changed the behavior and meaning of the "active" and "incomming" graphs to "outgoing" (to the network) and "incomming" (from the network). To determine the number of mails for these graphs the recent (5 minutes, hardcoded) syslog entries are grep'ed for signaling sequences indicating some kind of action of postfix.

Install

Clone this repository or download the postfix_mailqueue file and create a symlinkas root in /etc/munin/plugins by using e.g.:

cd /etc/munin/plugins; ln -s /your/path/to/postfix_mailqueue postfix_mailqueue

Since this script does not honor a environment variable to locate your mail.log you currently have to set the MAILLOG variable (which defaults to /var/log/mail.log) in the script's header.

Next make sure that munin is allowed or at least allows this script to read your mail.log. How to do this depends on your system.

On Debian 6 mail.log is owned by root:adm and readable by nobody but them. The recommended way here is to advice munin to run postfix_mailqueue with group adm (and user postfix, by default) by modifying /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node where you should change/add a line to the [postfix_mailqueue] section:

group adm

Later you will set the mail.log path here, too.

syslog5mins

This little bash function returns the entries of a file (created in format of syslog default template; especially timestamp) of the last 5 minutes.