Trying to monitor the postfix 2.x server and see that it is working

[hypermike]

I would like to monitor the postfix server on a Solaris box. I go to hyperic client running postfix and open the tools menu and say add server. Postfix is a server . I edit the config file for the server with the info it needs. using a description of "monitor postfix".I now see a Green availability ball for the postfix server. on the dashboard

Is this telling me that postfix is sending mail properly ? or that the postfix process just exists.? Why do i need to read the mail queues??? Do i need to have permissions to read queues to see if postfix is working (not just there ???)

In the config file it said that I need to run the chyperic client agent as root or have permissions to read the mail queues. Im NOt running the client as root . Why do I need permission to read the defer or mail queues for ???

Can you tell me what the Green ball for postfix is saying ??
an d why there are orange balls for the defer queues an no other queues are mentioned.

Under Servers -postfix2.x monitor postfix(my named file) , I see a orage ball fore the Postfix 2.x queue...under which are defer queue and deferred queue both orange ..

I guess these are the queues that I need the root client running for ????

Are these the only queues I need to monitor ??? Does hyperic pluging use thses
queues to test the proper functioninf of postfix???

[lstep]

The reason that you need to be root is that most of the time Postifx installations are in a chroot evironment, so it is isolated from the rest of the system. Access right to the spool directories is restricted (only postfix user has access for example on some Linux system).
So to be able to access easily Postfix queues, root acess is the solution.

[hypermike]

Can anyone tell me what Im monitoring when I see :

I edit the config file for the server with the info it needs. using a description of "monitor postfix".I now see a Green availability ball for the postfix server. on the dashboard

Is this telling me that postfix is sending mail properly ? or that the postfix process just exists.? Why do i need to read the mail queues??? Do i need to have permissions to read queues to see if postfix is working (not just there ???)

Under Servers -postfix2.x monitor postfix(my named file) , I see a orage ball fore the Postfix 2.x queue...under which are defer queue and deferred queue both orange .. What are these
monitoring . Does hyperic plugin use thsesqueues to test the proper functioninf of postfix???

[rwmastel]

I'm reviving a very old thread here, but there are very few Postfix mail queue threads.

I am runing Hyperic vFabric 5.0 and I have a Postfix plugin 5.0 in my environment.  We have a few Linux mail servers (Oracle Ent. Linux, based on Red Hat) which run Postfix and we want to monitor the mail queues.  Running the agent as root on these systems, the Postfix server gets auto-discovered.  This allows me to see the basic metric indicator charts.  In the Inventory tab for the Postfix server, I double checked all the config fields and they are correct, so I assumed that the checkbox for "Auto-Discover Queues" would do just that and I would have metric indicators for queue length.  I don't see that, and in INFO mode I don't see any Postfix plugin errors in the agent.log file.  I'll try DEBUG mode on the agent next, but I was wondering if anyone out there has this working.  Or, are my expectations out of line?

http://www.hyperic.com/products/postfix-monitoring