Monitoring InspIRCd with MRTG

This guide will show you how to configure MRTG to show statistics from an InspIRCd IRC server, this will include user counts and channel counts. This guide assumes you already have InspIRCd and MRTG setup and working. You can see an example of this working at Sector 5D.

InspIRCd config

First, you will need to configure InspIRCd to use the m_http and m_http_stats module. I configure InspIRCd to listen on localhost and port 8081 with SSL, but you could pick any port you want, just remember to change the $address variable inside inspircd-stats.sh later.

Note, the following config is for InspIRCd 2.0, if you use a older version you may need to change the bind line to a http line, please see the InspIRCd wiki for using a older version.

<module name="m_httpd.so">
<module name="m_httpd_stats.so">
<bind address="localhost" port="8081" type="httpd" ssl="gnutls">

Once you have placed this in your InspIRCd config, you can rehash or reload InspIRCd and then you will be able to connect to it over http(s) to retrive stats. Such as at https://localhost:8081/stats

Creating a script to gather the user or channel count on InspIRCd

The following script queries the InspIRCd m_httpd_stats module for the user or channel count. This depends on XMLStarlet (Debian package, Arch AUR Package), so please install this first.

#!/bin/sh

address="https://localhost:8081/stats"
count_type=$1

if [[ "$count_type" != "user"  && "$count_type" != "channel" ]]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 <user|channel>"
  exit 1
elif

count=$(wget -q -Y off -O - --no-check-certificate $address | xml sel -t -v "inspircdstats/general/${count_type}count")

echo $count
echo $count
echo "IRC $count_type"

This script will need to be available from the user which you run MRTG as. I have placed mine in /usr/local/bin/inspircd-stats.sh but you could place it somewhere like $HOME/bin/inspircd-stats.sh.

To download and install this to /usr/local/bin run the following:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
sudo wget https://raw.github.com/gist/1042604/b19a4cfd91b6956063d962c977f3d5f8e3318d7d/inspircd-stats.sh -O /usr/local/bin/inspircd-stats.sh
sudo chmod+x /usr/local/bin/inspircd-stats.sh

Now you have this inspircd-stats.sh script, you can use it to get the user and channel count as follows:

/usr/local/bin/inspircd-stats.sh user
/usr/local/bin/inspircd-stats.sh channel

MRTG Config

You will need to add the following to your mrtg config file, this could be located at /etc/mrtg.cfg, but this depends on how you setup mrtg.

# For IRC Users:
Target[irc.users]: `/usr/local/bin/inspircd-stats.sh user`
Title[irc.users]: IRC Users
PageTop[irc.users]: <h1>IRC Users</h1>
MaxBytes[irc.users]: 10000000000
ShortLegend[irc.users]: users
YLegend[irc.users]: Users
LegendI[irc.users]: Users
LegendO[irc.users]:
Legend1[irc.users]: Users
Legend2[irc.users]:
Options[irc.users]: growright,nopercent,gauge

# For IRC Channels:
Target[irc.channels]: `/usr/local/bin/inspircd-stats.sh channel`
Title[irc.channels]: IRC Channels
PageTop[irc.channels]: <h1>IRC Channels</h1>
MaxBytes[irc.channels]: 10000000000
ShortLegend[irc.channels]: channels
YLegend[irc.channels]: Channels
LegendI[irc.channels]: Channels
LegendO[irc.channels]:
Legend1[irc.channels]: Channels
Legend2[irc.channels]:
Options[irc.channels]: growright,nopercent,gauge

Now, you can run your MRTG command for your config or wait for the MRTG cron and it should show up your InspIRCd stats.