i’ve used mrtg for monitoring network statistics. it’s a bit of a challenge to configure but cfgmaker helps A LOT. unless you know shell scripting, you can’t monitor more than network statistics. mrtg begat rrdtool? rrdtool begat mrtg? i forget. either way, there’s an opensource project called ‘cacti‘ which allows a nice graphical configuration for setting up and monitoring network-enabled devices.
if you have an existing debian or ubuntu installation configured for web and database services, there’s a couple more steps to making it run properly. cacti uses command-line php scripts to perform data queries and update the database. default installations of php on debian or ubuntu don’t have php enabled for command-line.
time for the dependancies:
- apt-get install mysql-server snmpd apache2 php5-mysql php5-gd php5-cli php5-cgi php5-imagick php5-xmlrpc
time for cacti
- apt-get install cacti
- configure SNMP (/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf) and restart it so cacti can read SNMP data from it.
- large device lists require additional tweaking to phpX-cli to make it function properly. edit /etc/phpX/cli/php.ini and make the following changes:
max_execution_time 300
max_input_time 60
memory_limit 64M
tips:
- if the device you’re monitoring can support SNMP version 2c or 3, use it. when you create your interface graphs, choose 64-bit counters (whether bits/sec or bytes/sec depends on your needs.) in today’s gigabit world, you can roll the 32-bit counters within one polling intereval
updated 11/30/2008
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