Postfix

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: postfix

Overview

Keep an eye on Postfix metrics for efficient mail server operations. Improve your mail server performance with Netdata's real-time metrics and built-in alerts.

Monitors MTA email queue statistics using postqueue tool.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

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

Postfix has internal access controls that limit activities on the mail queue. By default, all users are allowed to view the queue. If your system is configured with stricter access controls, you need to grant the netdata user access to view the mail queue. In order to do it, add netdata to authorized_mailq_users in the /etc/postfix/main.cf file. See the authorized_mailq_users setting in the Postfix documentation for more details.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

The collector executes postqueue -p to get Postfix queue statistics.

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 Postfix instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
postfix.qemails	emails	emails
postfix.qsize	size	KiB

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

File

There is no configuration file.

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.	1	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

Examples

There are no configuration examples.

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the postfix 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 postfix debug trace