Sysstat Mail Report

Send daily/weekly/monthly email reports with graphs plotted from sysstat monitoring data.

There are a lot of tools available to plot sysstat data and generate graphs, but they either have important limitations, or require a web server running to serve the graphs.

This tool attempts to be simple and efficient and allow generating periodic reports (from cron) to be emailed directly.

Features

• Allows generating daily/weekly/monthly reports
• Generates graphs (see examples below) with optional data from:
  • 5min load average
  • CPU usage
  • memory usage
  • swap usage
  • network IO
  • TCP/UDP socket stats (IPv4 & IPv6) + TCP (IPv4) socket state transistions
  • drive IO
  • filesystem usage
• (re)boot times are shown on each graph
• Automatically scale graphs according to system characteristics (eg. get total memory for memory graph y axis)
• Weekly and monthly graphs are automatically smoothed (hides small variations better viewed on daily graphs) to remain readable
• Properly handle special cases like DST time shifts, months with less than 30 days, etc
• Construct email with both PNG and alternate ASCII graphs to be compatible with text only mail clients, or low bandwidth mail viewing
• Automatically crunch images to save a few KB per email without any loss of quality
• Optionally support SVG images for crisp looking graphs ¹
• Few dependencies: sysstat, gnuplot, sendmail and Python 3.6 (no Python package dependencies): installing is as simple as copying a file on most servers. No server or daemon is required or installed.
• Execution is usually very fast, even with large data files, because all the data processing is done by Gnuplot

^{1. SVG rendering is currently not supported by many mail clients. In case of doubt, use the default PNG + text fallback mode.}

Graph examples

Click images to see full size.

Daily CPU graph:

Daily memory graph:

Daily network graph:

Daily IO graph:

Weekly network graph:

Dependencies

• Python >= 3.6
• Gnuplot >= 4.6
• sendmail (configured and ready to send emails)
• oxipng or optipng (optional)
• scour (optional)

And of course sysstat.

On Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives, you can install all of them with:
sudo apt-get install sysstat python3 gnuplot-nox sendmail-bin optipng scour

Installation

Arch Linux

Arch Linux users can install the sysstat-mail-report-git AUR package.

Manual

Download it to /usr/local/bin, ie with:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/desbma/sysstat_mail_report/master/sysstat_report.py > /usr/local/bin/sysstat_report.py && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sysstat_report.py

Sysstat configuration

For the weekly and monthly reports to be generated properly, you may need to increase the value of HISTORY in /etc/sysstat/sysstat, to respectively at least 7 and 31.

Stat files compressed with gzip, bzip2 or xz are supported.

To enable the filesystem usage and socket/tcp reports, you need to edit the SADC_OPTIONS variable in /etc/sysstat/sysstat to add respectively -S XDISK and -S SNMP,IPV6.

Usage

Cron

The simplest way of calling the script is through a cron job, so for example for a daily report, create the file /etc/cron.daily/sysstat-report, make it executable, and add the lines:

#!/bin/sh
exec sysstat_report.py daily 'Sysstat <[email protected]>' '[email protected]'

When the script is called every day, you will receive an email with the graphs for the previous day.

Systemd

To control systat_report with Systemd, unit files are provided, you can install them by running ./install-systemd.sh. Follow given instructions to configure and enable periodic reports.

Command line options

Run sysstat_report.py -h to get full command line reference.

License

LGPLv2