FreeBSD Administration Question

[Matthew Seaman]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 10:18:38PM +0100, rik wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 08:41:20PM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > Another cool bit of monitoring software is MRTG --
> > http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/ and it's in ports.
> > MRTG works via SNMP, so you'll need to install net-snmp too.  It's
 
> An alternative (and possibly preferred ) solution is RRDTool. It is
> available from:
>   http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/
> It's by the same person (Tobi Oetiker), and is more powerful, flexible,
> and quicker to run. It will log any data you give to it. From any source.

> Literally, anything you can extract numbers for, it will graph. It does
> mean writing your own data gathering scripts though, but that's not
> hard. Just a few lines of perl will usually do.

Actually, I tend to agree with you about RRDTool.  In fact, what I was
hinting at was to use RRDTool with MRTG.  It's just a flag in the
config file: `LogFormat: rrdtool'.  I gather Tobi Oetiker's intention
is to make rrdtool the basis of the next generation of MRTG, but the
rrdtool integration that's already there works very well
already. Think of it as using a `few lines of perl' written by
somebody else.

As for SNMP: certainly this is not something you should run lightly or
without due regard for the consequences.  However, for a situation
where you have many machines spread around a network, and need to
concentrate your monitoring data onto a central machine, or where you
need to monitor routers and the like then SNMP is your friend.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
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