Basing more and more stuff on mcollective means relying more and more on one of its underlying components : the activeMQ middleware, and more precisely the stomp connector. I hit a weird bug a few days ago and realized that I was not functionnaly monitoring this part of the system. The port was bound and responded to connections, subscriptions were possible but messages didn’t pass through.So I wrote this little plugin that makes this possible : it creates a random string, sends it to a queue and then reads the queue to check if the result is the same.

Readers of this little blog may know I’ve spent some time to have a munin setup that was tweaked to be optimized. But I’ve reached a point where my knowledge did not suffice to balance the design problems of munin. This is not a rant, I just say that when your infrastructure reaches a certain size munin reaches its limits. The pull based model, the graph generation (don’t tell me about the CGI graph, this thing never worked as expected) overloaded my management box. Talking with other peoples brought collectd to my attention so I gave it a try.