Running the monitoring agent as root user

By default the nixstatsagent runs under it's own user nixstats. This prevents the monitoring agent to have access to certain data such as process level disk I/O.

Here is how to run the nixstatsagent as root user to unlock these statistics.

If you have a file at /etc/systemd/system/nixstatsagent.service your services run from systemd, else try the init.d method.

Systemd

Open /etc/systemd/system/nixstatsagent.service and change the line with User=nixstats to User=root

Run systemctl daemon-reload to reload the file change.

Init.d

Open /etc/init.d/nixstatsagent and edit the line proguser=nixstats to proguser=root

If you don't have this line in your file replace this one

start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --name $NAME --oknodo --pidfile $PIDFILE --chuid nixstats --background --make-pidfile --startas $DAEMON

with this:

start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --name $NAME --oknodo --pidfile $PIDFILE --chuid root --background --make-pidfile --startas $DAEMON

OpenBSD

Open /etc/rc.d/nixstatsagent and chagne the line with : ${nixstats_run_user="nixstats"} to : ${nixstats_run_user="root"}

After making these changes run service nixstatsagent restart.

Check if the agent is running as root:

root@test:~# ps aux | grep nixstats
root  1324  0.2  1.6 564592 16832 ?        Ssl  May16 293:31 /usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/nixstatsagent

Updated on: 15/07/2019