Squid

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: squid

Overview

This collector monitors statistics about the Squid Clients and Servers, like bandwidth and requests.

It collects metrics from the endpoint where Squid exposes its counters data.

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

By default, this collector will try to autodetect where Squid presents its counters data, by trying various configurations.

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 Squid instance

These metrics refer to each monitored Squid instance.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
squid.clients_net	in, out, hits	kilobits/s
squid.clients_requests	requests, hits, errors	requests/s
squid.servers_net	in, out	kilobits/s
squid.servers_requests	requests, errors	requests/s

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

Configure Squid's Cache Manager

Take a look at Squid's official documentation on how to configure access to the Cache Manager.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is python.d/squid.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/squid.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.	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.	local	no
host	The host to connect to.		yes
port	The port to connect to.		yes
request	The URL to request from Squid.		yes

Examples

Basic

A basic configuration example.

example_job_name:
  name: 'local'
  host: 'localhost'
  port: 3128
  request: 'cache_object://localhost:3128/counters'

Multi-instance

Note: When you define multiple jobs, their names must be unique.

Collecting metrics from local and remote instances.

Config

local_job:
  name: 'local'
  host: '127.0.0.1'
  port: 3128
  request: 'cache_object://127.0.0.1:3128/counters'

remote_job:
  name: 'remote'
  host: '192.0.2.1'
  port: 3128
  request: 'cache_object://192.0.2.1:3128/counters'

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the squid 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 squid debug trace