Installing Observium agent onto Ubuntu

I have started to use Observium for monitoring. It is really good. To get better insight into my machines I have started to use the Unix Agent to view info about BIND, Apache, VMTools etc. I had a bit of trouble finding some clear steps about how to install onto Ubuntu so here is what I did to install.

First install xinetd and libwww-perl (libwww-perl is required for the apache monitoring)

sudo apt-get install xinetd libwww-perl

Within the observium_agent_xinetd script you will need to adjust the following line. replace 127.0.0.1 with the IP of the observium server

# configure the IPv[4|6] address(es) of your Observium server here:
 only_from      = 192.168.1.250

Next change into the xinetd config directory and install the observium_agent_xinetd script with the modifications above.

cd /etc/xinetd.d/
sudo vi observium_agent_xinetd

#Copy the observium_agent_xinetd script into the vi session and exit

Next we install the agent into the bin folder, set its permissions and restart xinetd

##Change Directory
cd /usr/bin/

##Create the observium_agent file
sudo vi observium_agent

## Copy the observium_agent script into the VI session and then exit

## Change the file permissions
sudo chmod 766 observium_agent

##Restart xinetd
sudo service xinetd restart

Last step is to create the required application scripts. For this example I will add two. One for apache, one for MySQL.

First up lets create the required folders.

##Change directory
cd /usr/lib/

##Make the observium_agent folder under /usr/lib
sudo mkdir observium_agent

##Change directory
cd observium_agent/

##Make the local folder within the observium_agent folder
sudo mkdir local

##Change into local folder
cd local

Creating scripts is easy, for the apache script all you do is create the file and copy the script into the new file.

##Create the file
sudo vi apache

##Copy the apache file contents into the vi session and exit.

MySQL was a little bit more difficult. You need to create a MySQL user account for the agent.

##Open MySQL
mysql -u root -p

##Create the user
GRANT SUPER, REPLICATION SLAVE, PROCESS ON *.* TO 'observium_mon'@'localhost'
IDENTIFIED BY 'ob_passw0rd';

Create the agent script

##Create the file
sudo vi mysql

##Copy the mysql file contents into the vi session and exit.

and the final step for the MySQL is to create the mysql.cnf file with the username and password open the mysql.cnf example file and modify these lines

  $mysql_user = '';
  $mysql_pass = '';

to 

  $mysql_user = 'observium_mon';
  $mysql_pass = 'ob_passw0rd';

Then copy the script to the machine

##Create the file
sudo vi mysql.cnf

##Copy the modified mysql.cnf file contents into the vi session and exit.

Last step is to change the permissions on the local scripts to be able to be executed.

##From within the /usr/lib/observium_agent/local folder
sudo chmod 766 *