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|
The Multi Router Traffic Grapher
Version 2.5, 24th October 1997
Programming by [1]Tobias Oetiker [2]<oetiker@ee.ethz.ch>
[3]Dave Rand [4]<dlr@bungi.com>
and a number of other people from the Global-Village
Documentation by [5]Tobias Oetiker [6]<oetiker@ee.ethz.ch>
Contents
* [7]What is the Multi Router Traffic Grapher
* [8]Highlights of MRTG
* [9]The History
* [10]Release Notes
* [11]Getting and Installing MRTG
* [12]Configuration Tips
* [13]Frequently Asked Questions
* [14]The MRTG Mailing List
* [15]Windows NT Notes
What is the Multi Router Traffic Grapher
The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the
traffic load on network-links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing
GIF images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic.
Check [16]http://www.ee.ethz.ch/stats/mrtg/ for an example. MRTG is
based on Perl and C and works under UNIX and Windows NT. MRTG is being
successfully used on many sites arrond the net. Check the
[17]MRTG-Site-Map.
MRTG is available under the GNU PUBLIC LICENSE.
The only thing I would like to ask happy users to do, is to
send a Picture Postcard to:
Tobias Oetiker, D-ELEK, ETH Zentrum, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
MRTG consists of a Perl script which uses SNMP to read the traffic
counters of your routers and a fast C program which logs the traffic
data and creates beautiful graphs representing the traffic on the
monitored network connection. These graphs are embedded into webpages
which can be viewed from any modern Web-browser
In addition to a detailed daily view, MRTG also creates visual
representations of the traffic seen during the last seven days, the
last four weeks and the last twelve months. This is possible because
MRTG keeps a log of all the data it has pulled from the router. This
log is automatically consolidated, so that it does not grow over time,
but still contains all the relevant data for all the traffic seen over
the last two years. This is all performed in an efficient manner.
Therefore you can monitor 50 or more network links from any halfway
decent UNIX box.
MRTG is not limited to monitoring traffic though, it is possible to
monitor any SNMP variable you choose. You can even use an external
program to gather the data which should be monitored via MRTG. People
are using MRTG, to monitor things such as System Load, Login Sessions,
Modem availability and more. MRTG even allows you to accumulate two or
more data sources into a single graph.
Highlights of MRTG
1. Works on most UNIX platforms and Windows NT
2. Uses Perl for easy customization
3. Has a highly portable SNMP implementation written entirely in Perl
thanks to Simon Leinen. There is no need to install any external
SNMP package.
4. MRTG's logfiles do NOT grow. Thanks to the use of a unique data
consolidation algorithm.
5. MRTG comes with a semi-automatic configuration tool.
6. MRTG's query engine checks for port reconfigurations on the router
and warns the user when they occur.
7. Time critical routines are written in C thanks to the initiative
of Dave Rand my Co-Author
8. Graphics are generated directly in GIF format, using the GD
library by Thomas Boutell.
9. The look of the webpages produced by MRTG is highly configurable.
10. MRTG is available under the GNU PUBLIC LICENSE.
History of MRTG
In 1994 I was working at a site where we had one 64kbit line to the
outside world. Obviously everybody was interested in knowing how the
link was performing. So I wrote a quick hack which created a
constantly updated graph on the web, showing the traffic load on our
Internet link. This eventually evolved into a rather configurable Perl
script called MRTG-1.0 which I released in spring 1995. After a few
updates I left my job at DMU, to start work at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology. Due to lack of time I had to put MRTG aside.
One day in January of 1996, I received email from Dave Rand asking if
I had any ideas why MRTG was so slow. Actually I did. MRTG's
programming was not very efficient and it was written entirely in
Perl. After a week or so, Dave wrote back to me and said he had tried
what I had suggested for improving MRTG's speed. Since the changes did
not help much, he had decided to rewrite the time-critical sections of
MRTG in C. The code was attached to his email. His tool increased the
speed of MRTG by a factor of 40! This got me out of my 'MRTG
ignorance' and I started to spend my spare time developing of MRTG-2.
Soon after MRTG-2 development had begun I started to give beta copies
to interested parties. In return I got many feature patches, a lot of
user feedback and bug fixes. The product you are getting now is the
result of a wonderful collaboration of many people. I would like to
take this opportunity to thank them all. (See the files CHANGES and
CONTRIBUTORS in the MRTG distribution.)
Release Notes
Version 2.5
Bugfixes: Skewing at log interval bounderies fixed. White space
at line-endings in cfgfiles handled gracefully. MaxBytes line
is only drawn if it is stricly inside the graph. Timezone
handling improved. Further fighting against the overflow bug.
Features: More compatible cfgmaker (--vendor switch). Added a
README about the logfile-format. Made a package in zip format
available for our NT friends. Same goes for rateup.
Contribs:: PingProbe updated. Atmmaker to create cfg files for
FORE ASX. Rewrite of mailstats script.
Version 2.4
Bugfixes: IconDir works now, mrtg.cfg-dist debugged and
rewritten, replace int by sprintf "%.0f" to better handle large
numbers, better 'external command' Target parsing, debugged
BER.pm ...
Application tips for Apache-1.2 added to mrtg.cfg-dist
added nopercent option to supress display of percentage in html
page.
added contrib by Philippe.Simonet@SWISSTELECOM.com: a
c-programm to create gifs showing the traffic distribution over
time
Version 2.3
New Configuration Options: IconDir, XScale, YScale, Weekformat
check 'mrtg.cfg-dist' for details.
New Pingprobe version
Improved behaviour of rateup with Unscaled Option, MaxBytes and
AbsMax set. Now, the graphs will be scaled all the same as soon
as the traffic goes over MaxBytes.
Several bugfixes in rateup.c
Version 2.2
Lots of new and exciting things in the contrib area.
Made graphs in indexmaker generated pages clickable
made mrtg observe order of routers in cfg file .... as
suggested by Mick Ghazey
Added timezone configurable to set a timezone per router.
Details in mrtg.cfg-dist as suggested by Jun (John) Wu
Added MaxBytes sanity check ....
Fixed portability problem of Makefile under IRIX
Getting and Installing MRTG
1. Get the latest Version of MRTG from:
[18]http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/pub/
2. Get and compile the GD library by Thomas Boutell:
[19]http://www.boutell.com/gd/
3. Make sure you have Perl Version 5.003 or later on your system:
[20]http://www.perl.com/perl/info/software.html
4. Edit the MRTG Makefile to fit your system. At least change the
PERL and GD_LIB variables.
Then use make rateup to create the rateup binary.
And make substitute to insert the path of your Perl binary into
the perlscripts which come with MRTG.
5. Decide where MRTG should store the webpages it creates. Copy the
mrtg*.gif files into this directory. They will be referenced in
the generated webpages. You may also want to move the readme.html
file to this directory so that you have the docs handy when ever
you need them.
6. All the other files from the MRTG distribution should go into your
MRTG binary directory. This directory can be anywhere because MRTG
will find its location upon startup. The following files are
required to be in MRTG-bin: BER.pm, SNMP_Session.pm, mrtg, rateup.
7. Create your personal mrtg.cfg file. You find documentation about
this in the file [21]mrtg-conf.html See the Configuration Hints
section for some further help. The difficult part in creating the
configuration file is getting your router-port assignment correct.
To help you with this, the cfgmaker tool will generate all the
router specific parts of your configuration file.
cfgmaker <community>@<router-host-name or IP>
If you don't know the community of your router, try public as
community name.
If you are upgrading from any pre 2.0 version of MRTG, you need to
run the convert script with your old logfiles, in order to bring
them over to the mrtg-2.0 log-file-format.
Try to start MRTG. Type ./mrtg mrtg.cfg on the command line, while
you are in your MRTG binary directory. MRTG will now parse your
configuration file, and complain if you have introduced any
unknown keywords or structures. If MRTG is happy with the cfg
file, it starts gathering traffic data from the routers you have
specified. With this information it will then start the rateup
tool which will create a logfile and a traffic graph GIF for each
Target. When you start MRTG for the very first time, rateup will
complain that it can not find any logfiles and the graphs
generated will look rather empty. Just ignore the complaints. If
you remove the empty graphs, and run MRTG again, rateup will
create new graphs which look better.
Integrate MRTG into your crontab. Just add the following line to
your crontab file to have MRTG run every 5 minutes (The line is
broken for readability only. Replace the backslash in the first
line with the second line):
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * \
<mrtg-bin>/mrtg <path to mrtg-cfg>/mrtg.cfg
Configuration Tips
+ If you are monitoring a number of links, you might want to
create an overview page. For our own site I have created the
indexmaker script, which you can use to create a html page
containing hrefs that point to your individual traffic
statistics pages. Note, that you need to edit this script for
your purposes. The script you got, includes our Universities
Logo (http://www.ee.ethz.ch/eth.199x32.gif) into the page.
indexmaker <mrtg.cfg> <regexp for router-names>
+ If you are monitoring many targets, use the special target
names '^' and '$' to prepend or append text to any of the
Keywords in the sections below. Note that the definition of
the '^' and '$' targets are position dependant. They always
influence the lines bleow in the cfg file.
+ Since MRTG updates it's graphs every 5 minutes, you may
experience problems with proxy caches and local Netscape
browser caches. Sometimes these caches will return the old
cached graphics instead of the real and updated versions from
the webserver.
If you are running the apache webserver, you can use the
WriteExpire Keyword in the mrtg.cfg file. With this, mrtg
will create *.meta files for each gif and html page. These
files will contain 'Expire' headers which the Apache
webserver can ship out together with the gif and html pages
(Use to MetaDir keyword in the apache config file to enable
this). With the information from the expire headers, Netscape
and all the proxy caches will know when they have to fetch a
new version of the file from your website and when they can
use their cached version.
+ Although MRTG's primary use is traffic monitoring, you can
observe any SNMP variable you want. People are using it to
monitor ModemBanks, ServerLoad, ErrorRates on Interfaces and
many other things. If you are using MRTG for something other
than traffic monitoring, please send me a short blurb to
include here. Best would be with a sample URL and some hints
about how you have configured MRTG ...
Frequently Asked Question with Answers
Q:I need more documentation ...
A:Make sure you have checked the files 'mrtg-conf.html' and
'mibhelp.txt' as well as the contributed scripts in the 'contrib'
directory of you mrtg distribution. If you need even more infos,
make sure to check the mailing list archive as well. There has
also been an article about SNMP and mrtg in a recent Linux
Journal. It's author David Guerroro has made it available on the
net. Check [22]http://www.mec.es/~david/papers/snmp
Q:My perl complains about the SNMP_Session.pm library ...
A:If you are running a version of perl before 5.002 you should use
'SNMP_Session.pm-for-perl5.001.
Q:The GIFs created by MRTG look very strange. Not all the grid
lines are drawn and ...
A:Remove the *-{week,day,month,year}.gif files and start MRTG
again. Using MRTG for the first time, you might have to do this
twice. This will also help, when you introduce new routers into
the cfg file.
Q: What is my Community Name?
A:Try 'public', as this is the default Community Name.
Q: I compiled your program and I get the following errors: at the
command line I typed ./mrtg kirit.cfg and I get :
Can't locate Socket.pm in @INC at /SNMP_Session.pm line 27.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /SNMP_Session.pm line 27.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./mrtg line 356.
A: You need to get Perl5 installed properly. Socket.pm comes with
Perl5 and is an integral part of Perl5. Perl5 comes with compiled
in defaults about where it should look for its libraries (eg
Socket.pm). Type 'perl -V' to see what your perl assumes ... And
get it fixed ... Eg by installing it properly.
If your questions are still not answered, make sure to check out
the [23]Official MRTG FAQ Site and browse the [24]MRTG Mailinglist
Archives.
MRTG Mailing List
There are two mailing lists for MRTG available. One is called
'mrtg' and is a discussion list for users and developers. The
other is called 'mrtg-announce' and is a low volume list for MRTG
related announcements.
To subscribe to these mailing lists, send a message with the
subject line subscribe to either mrtg-request@list.ee.ethz.ch or
mrtg-announce-request@list.ee.ethz.ch. For posting to the mrtg
list use the address mrtg@list.ee.ethz.ch.
Further information about the usage of the mailing lists is
available by sending a message with the subject line 'help' to
either one of the request addresses.
For past activity there is also a mailing list archive available:
[25]http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/mrtg
MRTG on Windows NT
By Stuart Schneider <SchneiS@testlab.orst.edu>
To setup mrtg on a WindowsNT system, you can follow the
instructions already provided for UNIX systems with the following
addition:
6.5. Change the $main::OS setting at the top of the mrtg script to
equal 'NT'.
Or, for those who need a little extra help, follow these steps:
+ Download and unpack the latest version of mrtg from:
[26]http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/pub/.
+ Download and install the latest version of Perl 5 for Win32
from [27]Activware. Check the [28]Perl for Win32 FAQ for more
info on perl.
+ Download the pre-compiled version of rateup from:
[29]http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/pub/
+ Edit the main mrtg script downloaded in step #1 and remove
the "#" from the beginning of the line that reads "$main::OS
= 'NT';".
+ Create a batch file with the following command: perl {path to
mrtg}\mrtg {path to mrtg.cfg}\mrtg.cfg
For example: perl c:\mrtg\mrtg c:\mrtg\mrtg.cfg
+ Use cfgmaker or manually configure your mrtg.cfg file
(documentation on the structure of the file is in the file
mrtg.cfg-dist).
+ Execute your batch file from step #6 from a command prompt to
verify that there are no errors in your mrtg.cfg file and
that everything is working correctly. (On the first pass it
is normal to see four warnings from Rateup about your log
files for each router interface).
+ If everything looks good, configure the scheduler (AT)
service to run the batch file from step #6 every 5 minutes.
Alternatively you might want to use this perlscript to start
mrtg every 300 seconds:
$interval=300;
while (1) {
sleep( $interval - time() % $interval );
system 'c:\bin\perl mrtg mrtg.cfg';
}
_____________________________________________________________
If you have any questions about this program, or have it up and
running,
we would like to hear from you:
[30][31]MRTG [32]
2.5-1997/10/24 [33]Tobias Oetiker [34]<oetiker@ee.ethz.ch>
and [35]Dave Rand [36]<dlr@bungi.com>
References
1. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker
2. mailto:oetiker@ee.ethz.ch
3. http://www.bungi.com/
4. mailto:dlr@bungi.com
5. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker
6. mailto:oetiker@ee.ethz.ch
7. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#WHAT
8. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#HIGH
9. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#HIST
10. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#RELE
11. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#INST
12. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#TIPS
13. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#FAQ
14. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#LIST
15. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/readme.html#NT
16. http://www.ee.ethz.ch/stats/mrtg/
17. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/users.html
18. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/pub/
19. http://www.boutell.com/gd/
20. http://www.perl.com/perl/info/software.html
21. file://localhost/usr/tardis/delek/staff/support/data/tools/www/mrtg/mrtg-conf.html
22. http://www.mec.es/~david/papers/snmp
23. http://www.ltinet.net/info/mrtg/noflashmrtg.htm
24. http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/mrtg
25. http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/mrtg
26. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/pub/
27. http://www.activestate.com/software/default.htm
28. http://www.endcontsw.com/people/evangelo/Perl_for_Win32_FAQ.html
29. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/pub/
30. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html
31. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html
32. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html
33. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker
34. mailto:oetiker@ee.ethz.ch
35. http://www.bungi.com/
36. mailto:dlr@bungi.com
|
