What to do if the Server Monitoring Agent isn’t sending any data?

If you’re using our Server Monitoring Agent, but it isn’t sending any data to our platform, you will see an error like this:

Here’s a few common things you should look for which may fix the issue:

  1. First of all, you should re-install the agent on your server, just to make sure that you’re running the latest version.
    Here’s the install instructions: Linux Server Monitor and PHP Server Monitor. Be sure to give it at least 2 minutes after installing the agent for our platform to start receiving data from it.
  2. You can also try running the agent under the ‘root’ user, as described here: https://docs.hetrixtools.com/run-server-monitor-agent-as-root/
    (only works for the linux server monitoring agent)
  3. Make sure your server can access the following hostname ‘sm.hetrixtools.net’.
    Perform the following test from your server’s command line:
    curl -v -L https://sm.hetrixtools.net/test/
    this should return basic debug info and at the end the text OK. If anything else is returned, such as a CloudFlare error html code, then that is a problem.
  4. Next up, be sure to check and ensure that your cronjobs are working properly. You can easily check this by going to the HetrixTools Server Monitoring Agent folder on your server /etc/hetrixtools/. There should be two log files named hetrixtools_agent.log and hetrixtools_cron.log which our agent writes data to every minute, so if your cronjobs are not working, then these files will have not been recently updated (check last modified timestamp).
    If your cronjobs are not working you should check if the following file exists /etc/cron.d/cron.allow and if it exists add the hetrixtools user to it, and reinstall the monitoring agent. If you’re still experiencing issues with your cronjobs after this, you should contact your system administrator for further assistance on the server.
  5. Check the agent log files hetrixtools_agent.log and hetrixtools_cron.log located in /etc/hetrixtools/ for any errors. These log files may contain errors related to why the agent isn’t able to send any data to our platform. If you find any errors in these files, you can open a support ticket on our website and contact our support department to provide you with further assistance (be sure to paste the encountered errors in the ticket).
  6. If your server has Network Attached Drives (NAS), and if these are sometimes slow or not working at all, it can cause the agent to slow or freeze.
    Run the following command to force the agent to only monitor local drives:
    sed -i 's/df /df -l /' /etc/hetrixtools/hetrixtools_agent.sh
  7. Make sure that your server isn’t having network connectivity issues, specifically issues in sending out data.
  8. Another possible issue would be if your server is experiencing critically high load, so it cannot perform routine basic tasks, such as running the agent or sending out its data (i.e.: 100% cpu load).
  9. Be sure to check for any DNS issues. Your server must be able to resolve the hostname where it would send out the monitoring data to, so if for any reason your server fails these DNS queries (i.e.: DNS outage), then it won’t be able to send out data to our platform.
  10. Lastly, if every other option hasn’t given you any clues or fixed the issue, you can enable Debug Mode, let it run enough to catch some events where the agent isn’t sending data, and then send the debug log to our support.

Most of these issues are beyond our control and out of our hands to fix, so you should discuss this with your server administrator in order to look into these issues for you.

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