Documentation forServer & Application Monitor
Monitoring your applications and environment is a key capability of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly Hybrid Cloud Observability) and is available in the Essentials edition. Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is also available in a standalone module.

Unix Sendmail Monitoring Perl

This SAM application monitor template uses Perl scripts to assess the sendmail performance of computers running AIX 5.3 or 6.1, or Solaris 8, 9, or 10.

Prerequisites:

SSH and Perl are installed on the target server.

If Perl is installed in a location different from /usr/bin/perl, edit paths in the first line of the field ”script body” (#!/usr/bin/perl) for component monitors, or create a symbolic link to Perl with ln command.

To determine where Perl is installed, use the following command: which perl

Credentials

Root credentials on the target server.

Some Unix implementations such as Solaris have a character limit in the input buffers of SSH sessions that prevents SolarWinds SAM from copying over scripts. If a monitored component fails to return a result or returns error code 255, manually copy the script to the target machine and then make the appropriate path and file name change in the Command Line field. For example, if you manually copied the script over as /usr/script.pl, you should change the Command Line to: perl /usr/script.pl.

This component has Count statistic as difference enabled. It will return the difference between two polling intervals.

Component monitors

Components without predetermined threshold values have guidance such as "Use the lowest threshold possible" or "use the highest threshold possible" to help you find a threshold appropriate for your application. To learn more, see Manage thresholds in SAM.

Sendmail instances running

The amount of instances of sendmail daemon that are currently started.

  • 0 – Sendmail is stopped. Run sendmail manually.
  • >1 – Sendmail is up and running.

Daemon: syslogd

The status of syslogd daemon (Syslog is a standard for logging program messages).

  • 0 – Syslog daemon is stopped. Run syslogd manually.
  • 1 – Syslog daemon is up and running.

Disk space usage (kB) of mail folder

The disk space in kB used by the user mailboxes in /var/mail.

Set thresholds according to your requirements.

Disk space usage (kB) of mail queue folder

The disk space in kB used by queued mail in /var/spool/mqueue.

Set thresholds according to your requirements.

Mail queue length

The number of items that are in the queue for delivery.

This should be as low as possible. If the mail queue value is constantly rising, it may indicate problems with delivering messages.

Set thresholds according to your requirements.

Available space on partition with /var/spool (MB)

The available space on the partition with /var/spool folder in MB.

By default, SAM checks available space on the root (/) partition. If you have created a separate partition /var or /var/spool you need change it in the script (grep "/\$"). You can investigate what partitions you have by using the following command: df

For the /var partition, change grep "/\$" to grep "/var\$"

For the /var/spool partition, change grep "/\$" to grep "/var/spool\$"

Set thresholds according to your requirements.