MRTG how safe is it?

[Stephen Granger]

Shawn,

MRTG Multi router traffic grapher was designed to monitor through-put on 
network devices, usually by making snmpget requests. I've just been trying to 
mangle it to make CPU load graphs, and others things.

Go to the mrtg website, www.mrtg.org and take a look at some of the examples
from other users, to get a feel for how people set mrtg up. Getting an initial 
setup is easy if you have an network device, eg a cisco router, that you can
make snmp requests on, and just running the cfmaker (I think?) script.

To get a bit more of a feel for things, I also had a look at the rrd tutorials.
Even though rrd is almost a complete redesign of mrtg, it still gives you a
background on how both mrtg and rrdtool work.

Just on Simon's comment on why don't I just run mrtg locally, instead of 
returning input through a port. You can't always assume that I will be running 
mrtg, and a web server (apache of course) on the same machine I'll be 
monitoring. Therefore, I can monitor CPU load from a remote machine, and only
have to run mrtg and apache on the one machine.

Could someone who's in the know, make some comments on SNMP, security wise,
and if they find it really useful for monitor network throughput. I've only
just realised some of it's capabilities. I was previously making sure it was 
just another one of those redundant services, that comes along with your 
bloated modern linux distribution that left a port open and you had to 
turn off/remove.

Also, is the SNMP broken in debian woody? I getting package broken when I 
try to apt get it... maybe I should look at the debian site first :)

Steve

On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 04:16:53PM +0800, Shawn Owens wrote:
> Stephen,
> 
> I've seen your post and was wondering if MRTG is capable of monitoring
> through-put on an Ethernet interface (Linux of course), ISDN interface, and
> HTTP hits/load?
> 
> If this is possible, where can I find the Howto's to implement this on my
> servers?
> 
> Thanks for any help you might be able to provide.
> 
> Shawn
>