Free Plugin for Monitoring Rackspace Postfix Email Queue
When Rackspace added “intelligence” dashboards to our hosting account, we were excited. Finally, one place to keep an eye on metrics for our cloud servers!
Unfortunately, the new dashboard didn’t include a pre-built plugin to monitor the Postfix email queue. To combat this omission, and to help others facing a similar Postfix monitoring issue, our CTO, Rob, created a script in Python. After setting up the plugin and configuring it within Rackspace, we were able to get graphs of the email queues and set thresholds that will issue alerts.
To add it to Rackspace Monitoring, follow the instructions below (the Rackspace Postfix Queue Plugin is open source Apache 2.0 licensed):
Depending on the distro, copy and paste the below code into the location/usr/lib/rackspace-monitoring-agent/plugins/postfix-queue.py
Edit the queue dir variable if different than /var/spool/postfix
chmod 755 postfix-queue.py
In Rackspace Monitoring, create a new Monitor Check
Choose “Custom Plugin” with the Command “postfix-queue.py”
Success, profit, and much celebration!
#!/usr/bin/env python """ Copyright 2015 Ender Technology Corp. - Rob Olmos ([email protected]) Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. ---- Rackspace Cloud Monitoring Plugin for Postfix Mail Queues Retrieves Stats for Postfix mail queues: active, bounce, corrupt, deferred, hold, incoming Usage: Place plug-in in /usr/lib/rackspace-monitoring-agent/plugins Setup a CLoud Monitoring Check of type agent.plugin to run python ./postfix-queues.py Update the queue_dir to your Postfix installation's queue directory. The following is an example 'criteria' for a Rackspace Monitoring Alarm: if (metric['queue.active'] >= 100) { return new AlarmStatus(CRITICAL, 'over 100 active emails' if (metric['queue.deferred'] >= '50') { return new AlarmStatus(WARNING, 'more than 50 deferred emails'); } return new AlarmStatus(OK, 'Less than 50 deferred emails'); Please note that you will need to adjust the thresholds based on what works for you. Available metrics are queue.active queue.bounce queue.corrupt queue.deferred queue.hold queue.incoming """ import os def walk_error(e): raise e def main(): try: queue_dir = '/var/spool/postfix' postfix_dirs = {'active': 0, 'bounce': 0, 'corrupt': 0, 'deferred': 0, 'hold': 0, 'incoming': 0} for postfix_dir in postfix_dirs.keys(): file_count = 0 dir_path = os.path.join(queue_dir, postfix_dir) for root, dirs, files in os.walk(dir_path, False, walk_error): file_count += len(files) postfix_dirs[postfix_dir] = file_count print "status ok succeeded in obtaining metrics" for dir_name, count in postfix_dirs.items(): print "metric queue.%s gauge %d" % (dir_name, count) except Exception, e: print "status err %s" % e if __name__ == '__main__': main()