Install Munin 2.0.x on Ubuntu 12.04

Ubuntu 12.04 is still one of the most popular linux distros with LTS term, yet it is packaged with a very outdated munin 1.4.6 binary distribution.

Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and “what just happened to kill our performance?” problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

Since it took me so much time to get munin 2.0.x working on Ubuntu 12.04, I write and share this tutorial as a reference in the hope of saving some of your quality time in case you need to do the same thing.

1. Add Munin Backport PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tuxpoldo/munin
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

2. Build munin dependencies and installation

sudo apt-get build-dep munin
sudo apt-get install munin munin-node

3. Configure munin

Edit /etc/munin/munin.conf and update graph_strategy and html_strategy setting to cgi.

sudo vi /etc/munin/munin.conf
# Search for graph_strategy and html_strategy
# Change their values to cgi

4. Enable munin plugins

sudo munin-node-configure --shell --families=contrib,auto | sh -x

5. Update apache configuration

Edit /etc/munin/apache.conf

sudo vi /etc/munin/apache.conf
# Search and replace "Allow from localhost ..." to "Allow from all"
sudo service apache2 restart

You are done. Goto the browser and visit http://your-domain/munin.

More information on the topic can be found http://munin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/