XML files are continually being pasted into data_in, what’s going on?

When we have queuing in /var/spool/pandora/data_in there is a series of checks and tests that we must do:

• Pandora FMS’ server status:

[root@pandora ~]# /etc/init.d/pandora_server status

If the pandora server is stopped, it is normal that there is a file stack, because the XML coming from the agents will not be processed.

• Number of BADXML files in /var/spool/pandora/data_in:

[root@pandora ~]# ls -l /var/spool/pandora/data_in | grep BADXML | wc -l

It could be that one or several of the agents are generating BADXML files, in case there are any, it would be advisable to delete them:

[root@pandora ~]# rm -rf /var/spool/pandora/data_in/*BADXML

• Number of threads configured in the Data server:

In the file /etc/pandora/pandora_server.conf

you can configure the number of threads used by the Data server to process data, so in case of queuing you should check if this number is low to increase the number of threads:

[root@pandora ~]# vi /etc/pandora/pandora_server.conf

Set:

dataserver_threads 5

After the change is made, the service must be restarted to make the change effective.

[root@pandora ~]# /etc/init.d/pandora_server restart

• Check xml_buffer at agents:

Parameter XML buffer is in /etc/pandora/pandora_agent.conf” agent’s file, if it is configured to 1 what it does is that, when the agent is out of contact with the pandora server and it can’t send the XMLto it, it accumulates the XML in the /tmp directory of the agent, so each interval occurs, it generates XML and if it can’t send them to the server it accumulates them, Once the connection is recovered, all the XML generated during the disconnection are sent, so we can have one or several agents that send an important amount of XML to the server in a short period of time, so the server would be stuck with XML that it has not processed.

1. As a solution you can do several things: change the dataserver_lifo to 1, in the /etc/pandora/pandora_server.conf server’s file, this token makes the XML processing faster.
2. Move the XML accumulated in /var/spool/pandora/data_in to a temporary directory, and then move it again little by little to /var/spool/pandora/data_in so that it processes them but in such a way that it doesn’t accumulate many in this directory.
3. Delete the queued XML, to do this action it is necessary to value how important is the monitoring that we are going to lose, because the queued XML are accumulated monitoring that has not been processed.