Find out how to effectively and easily monitor and troubleshoot Postfix using Netdata
What is Postfix
Postfix is an open-source mail transfer agent (MTA). It is used for sending and receiving emails, and supports features such as mail routing, aliasing, and forwarding. Postfix supports a wide range of protocols, is highly reliable and secure, and is easily configurable. It is suitable for deployments of any size, from small sites to large enterprises.
Monitoring Postfix with Netdata
The prerequisites for monitoring Postfix with Netdata are to have Postfix and Netdata installed on your system.
Netdata automatically discovers hundreds of services, and for those service that Netdata doesn't discvoer, turning on manual discovery is a one line configuration. For more information on configuring Netdata for Postfix monitoring please read the collector documentation.
You should now see the Postfix section on the Overview tab in Netdata Cloud already populated with charts about all the metrics you care about.
Netdata has a public demo space (no login required) where you can explore different monitoring use-cases and get a feel for Netdata.
What Postfix metrics are important to monitor?
qemails
- The
qemailsmetric represents the number of emails currently in the queue in Postfix. This metric should be monitored to ensure that the queue is not growing too large, which can lead to delays in email delivery.
qsize
- The
qsizemetric represents the total size of emails currently in the queue in Postfix. This metric should be monitored to ensure that the queue is not growing too large, which can lead to delays in email delivery.
Troubleshooting Postfix with Netdata
Alerts
Netdata has built-in alerts to reduce the monitoring burden for you.
If you would like to update the alert thresholds for any of these alerts or want to create your own alert for another metric – please follow the instructions here.
By default you will receive email notifications whenever an alert is triggered. (Note: if you would not like to receive these notifications you can turn them off from your profile settings.)
Anomaly Advisor
Anomaly Advisor lets you quickly identify if the system you are monitoring has any anomalies and allows you to drill down into which metrics are behaving anomalously.
To learn more about how to use Anomaly Advisor to troubleshoot your Apache web server check out the documentation or visit the anomalies tab in the demo space to play with it right now.
Metric Correlations
Metric Correlations lets you quickly find metrics and charts related to a particular window of interest that you want to explore further. By displaying the standard Netdata dashboard, filtered to show only charts that are relevant to the window of interest, you can get to the root cause sooner.
Let us hear from you
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Happy Troubleshooting!