We’ve been using Varnish cache for some time, and I’ve been massively impressed by both its performance and flexibility. As part of a solution to help scale websites it’s unbeatable, especially with its support for ESI.
Anyway, we wanted to integrate monitoring of Varnish into the existing Cacti setup we have, and so I wrote a little plugin to do this. It’s loosely based on the code posted here but it’s more ‘inspired by’ rather than based upon.
It produces just one graph (above), which shows the number of requests/second, hits/second and misses/second.
Installation is pretty straightforward:
- Make the Varnish management daemon available to your Cacti machine (Make sure you lock down appropriately with iptables or similar, because there is no authentication for this interface)
- Copy get_varnish_stats.py to your cacti scripts directory (/usr/share/cacti/site/scripts in Debian/Ubuntu)
- Import the XML template via the Cacti interface
You can download the plugin here.
