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.