Where does chrony monitoring show up?

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1

hello, I’ve got chrony running well and serving time publicly. I’d like to monitor chrony statistics like offset and root delay. Clearly there is provision for doing this with netdata. this link has some simple steps but nothing else to confirm netdata is monitoring chrony or how to debug if it’s not.

I’ve completed the steps and nothing is changing on the netdata http://localhost:19999/ page.

I’ve rebooted and made sure to restart both services with systemctl restart chrony and systemctl restart netdata.

there is an entry in /var/log/netdata/error.log with this:

python.d INFO: plugin[main] : [chrony] is disabled in the configuration file, skipping it

How can this be troubleshooted? something’s not working and it’s unclear what’s not working or why.

2

ok, got it.

the netdata.conf in /etc/netdata has some options, but this issue was solved by discovering python.d.conf in /usr/lib/netdata/conf.d.

this could have been more clear (by a lot) if this were placed at the end of all the helpful pages like this:
https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/agent/collectors/python.d.plugin/chrony

my suggestion is to update these pages with something that explains this.

3

Hello @comperem,

Thank you for your suggestion, I will work together @joel to improve our health documentation!

Please, keep in mind that files at /usr/lib/netdata/conf.d are overwritten when an update happens, instead you should use ./edit-config to do a permanent change.

Best regards!

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4

I suppose we could edit the docs for any collectors that are explicitly disabled in their plugin’s .conf with these instructions. That would definitely help in instances where a user doesn’t realize that the collector is disabled, and that even configuring it properly won’t allow it to run.

There aren’t many Python plugins explicitly disabled:

apache_cache: no
chrony: no
example: no
go_expvar: no
hpssa: no
logind: no
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5

Pinging @ilyam8 in case he has more collectors in mind so we can add them all with a nice PR.

6

This thread is a bit old, but the improvement I mentioned above was published earlier this week. All Python collectors that are disabled by default now include instructions on how to enable them.

There are no Go collectors disabled by default (as far as I can tell from looking at a recent go.d.conf file), so I think we’re good to go.

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