MRTG tool

snapdragon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm about to start working on a project that will provide MRTG style bandwidth usage stats from a Cisco router. I'll be using SNMP to communicate with the router to get the basic information.

So far I've looked into cimon, which seems pretty comprehensive. Does anyone have any strong views on this particular bit of software? Are there any other modules out that that are recommended?

As ever any help is greatly appreciated.

Comment on MRTG tool

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Re: MRTG tool by cbro (Pilgrim) on Apr 16, 2003 at 14:51 UTC
snapdragon, The only thing that bothered me was the description, "Cimon is a package for monitoring the load on cisco family products via snmp. It monitors and displays the cpu 5 minutes utilization in percents and free+used Processor memory". Going just off that and the rest of the description, it doesn't seem to be very configurable and made no mention of being able to monitor ifInOctets, IfOutOctets, etc (i.e. bandwidth OIDs). You mentioned that you'd like a recommendation...well I recommend RTG. I don't mean to sin in the monastery by recommending a C language tool, but I think I can make up for that by letting you know that it can be called via CGI and uses Perl scripts to automatically set up your targets (list of OIDs/Interfaces) file and MySQL database. As just mentioned, it logs to a MySQL database, so you can have all type of Perl DBI fun with it and easily write scripts to parse data and produce statistics. Via CGI, you can pass a numerous amount of arguments to accurately graph GAUGE/ASN_INTEGER OIDs (so it does what cimon does) and your normal 32/64 bit counter goodies. There's some pretty good docs and a good mailing list too (where all types of questions are usually answered quickly and correctly). I monitor over 700 interfaces w/a minimum of 3 OIDs each, and it has no problems. Chris	[reply]
Re: MRTG tool by jkenneth (Pilgrim) on Apr 16, 2003 at 15:19 UTC
The network guys in my company just ditched TrendSNMP for Cricket. Most tools seem to be based on RRDTOOL which is generally useful for any type of storage and graphing. JK	[reply]