Dovecot

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: dovecot

Overview

This collector monitors Dovecot metrics about sessions, logins, commands, page faults and more.

It uses the dovecot socket and executes the EXPORT global command to get the statistics.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector supports collecting metrics from multiple instances of this integration, including remote instances.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

If no configuration is given, the collector will attempt to connect to dovecot using unix socket localized in /var/run/dovecot/stats

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 Dovecot instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
dovecot.sessions	active sessions	number
dovecot.logins	logins	number
dovecot.commands	commands	commands
dovecot.faults	minor, major	faults
dovecot.context_switches	voluntary, involuntary	switches
dovecot.io	read, write	KiB/s
dovecot.net	read, write	kilobits/s
dovecot.syscalls	read, write	syscalls/s
dovecot.lookup	path, attr	number/s
dovecot.cache	hits	hits/s
dovecot.auth	ok, failed	attempts
dovecot.auth_cache	hit, miss	number

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

Dovecot configuration

The Dovecot UNIX socket should have R/W permissions for user netdata, or Dovecot should be configured with a TCP/IP socket.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is python.d/dovecot.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/dovecot.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.	5	no
priority	Controls the order of charts at the netdata dashboard.	60000	no
autodetection_retry	Sets the job re-check interval in seconds.	0	no
penalty	Indicates whether to apply penalty to update_every in case of failures.	yes	no
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.		no
socket	Use this socket to communicate with Devcot	/var/run/dovecot/stats	no
host	Instead of using a socket, you can point the collector to an ip for devcot statistics.		no
port	Used in combination with host, configures the port devcot listens to.		no

Examples

Local TCP

A basic TCP configuration.

Config

localtcpip:
 name: 'local'
 host: '127.0.0.1'
 port: 24242

Local socket

A basic local socket configuration

Config

localsocket:
 name: 'local'
 socket: '/var/run/dovecot/stats'

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the dovecot 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 dovecot debug trace