mrtg

[Charles Steinkuehler]

> > > Anyone here set u and run mrtg?
> >
> > Yup...works pretty slick.  I collect stats on seven different physical
> > locations, each with between 3 and about 20 interfaces that get
monitored
> > for bandwidth.
> >
> > Charles Steinkuehler
> > charles at steinkuehler.net
>
> Hey Charles,
> Sounds excellant!! Any chance you've written a HOWTO concerning your
> experiences?  Can you point me to one?

I pretty much just followed the instructions listed in the unix-install
guide:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/unix-guide.html

As long as you've got SNMP working properly, MRTG is pretty easy to use.
Verify you've got SNMP setup by doing an snmpwalk of your target system
(snmpwalk myrouter.mydomain.com public).  If you get a long list of MIB
data, you're set.

Now just make a config file for MRTG using cfgmaker (after you've
compiled/installed MRTG).  Set mrtg to either run from cron, or run
periodically w/o exiting, and that's it.  You'll have a directory of html
files & graphics you can link into web pages (you can use indexmaker if you
want a quick & dirty overview index page).

I initially thought it would take a day or two to get MRTG setup & working,
being new to both MRTG and SNMP at the time, but it was really much easier
than I thought, and only took an hour or so.

Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net