What is Dovecot?
Dovecot is a free and open source IMAP and POP3 server for Unix-like systems. It provides an efficient, secure, and highly configurable platform for storing and retrieving email. Dovecot is a powerful server that provides an extensible architecture, allowing users to implement custom authentication, access control, and retrieval strategies. It also provides advanced features such as easy deployment, mailbox management, secure connections, and support for multiple protocols.
Monitoring Dovecot with Netdata
The prerequisites for monitoring Dovecot with Netdata are to have Dovecot and Netdata installed on your system.
Netdata auto discovers hundreds of services, and for those it doesn’t turning on manual discovery is a one line configuration. For more information on configuring Netdata for Dovecot monitoring please read the collector documentation.
You should now see the Dovecot 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 Dovecot metrics are important to monitor?
Sessions
- The number of active sessions connected to Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Logins
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The number of successful logins to the Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
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The authentication activity of Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Commands
- The number of commands sent to the Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Page faults
- The number of major and minor faults encountered by the Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Context switches
- The number of voluntary and involuntary context switches that occur in Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Disk
- The Disk I/O activity of Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Network
- The network activity of Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
System
- The system calls made by Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Lookups
- The lookup activity of Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
Cache
- The cache activity of Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server.
