[CentOS] SNMP and OID/MIB/MRTG

Fri Sep 12 03:05:12 UTC 2008
Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at gmail.com>

Hi,

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 22:55, Bob Hoffman <bob at bobhoffman.com> wrote:
> Needless to say, MRTG is now off as is snmp. I think this will be one of
> those 'maybe next year when I can learn all about acessing hardware like an
> engineer' and all.

You can actually use MRTG without SNMP, specially if you are plotting
graphs for the local machine only, by using the backticks feature of
MRTG. You can actually write shell commands or scripts that gather the
numbers, using commands such as netstat, ifconfig, df, vmstat, iostat,
etc., and use them inside `...` inside your MRTG config file. I used
to do it to get information from data collected through BigBrother
monitoring system, the same can also be done with Nagios.

But if you are looking into implementing a graphing solution, you
should probably look into a more modern tool, since MRTG is quite
outdated and it has several shortcomings (only integer values, only
two datasets per graph, etc.) I would recommend you look into Cacti or
Munim, since those are simpler and more featurefull than MRTG. Oh, and
both have their own data collecting agents, so you don't have to mess
with SNMP to make it work. This is not always good, me, for instance,
I prefer to collect all my data using SNMP, as I can use the same
protocol to gather data from Unix machines, Windows machines, network
switches, VPN concentrators, Environment Monitoring Systems, UPSs, and
so on. But for what you want, I believe Cacti or Munim (and certainly
other similar systems) would be quite appropriate.

HTH,
Filipe