OpenVPN monitoring with Netdata

OpenVPN is an open-source commercial software that implements virtual private network techniques to create secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities.

This module will monitor one or more OpenVPN instances via Management Interface.

Requirements

• OpenVPN with enabled management-interface.

Charts

It produces the following charts:

• Total Number Of Active Clients in clients
• Total Traffic in kilobits/s

Per user charts (disabled by default, see per_user_stats in the module config file):

• User Traffic in kilobits/s
• User Connection Time in seconds

Configuration

This collector is disabled by default. Should be explicitly enabled in go.d.conf.

Reason:

Currently, the OpenVPN daemon can at most support a single management client any one time.

We disabled it to not break other tools which uses Management Interface.

Edit the go.d/openvpn.conf configuration file using edit-config from the Netdata config directory, which is typically at /etc/netdata.

cd /etc/netdata # Replace this path with your Netdata config directory
sudo ./edit-config go.d/openvpn.conf

Needs only address of OpenVPN Management Interface. Here is an example for 2 OpenVPN instances:

jobs:
  - name: local
    address: /dev/openvpn

  - name: remote
    address: 203.0.113.10:7505

For all available options please see module configuration file.

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot issues with the openvpn collector, run the go.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

First, navigate to your plugins directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the setting plugins directory. Once you're in the plugin's directory, switch to the netdata user.

cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/
sudo -u netdata -s

You can now run the go.d.plugin to debug the collector:

./go.d.plugin -d -m openvpn