MRTG and Internet Site Reporting

mrtg

MRTG and Internet Site ReportingUsing MRTG to graph host level information and use it as a troubleshooting tool for Monitoring Staff
What is MRTG and where can I get it?
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 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 around the net. Check the MRTG-Site-Map.
Possible Use
What I have realized that might be of interest to those who deploy or support web servers is that mrtg can be of great help to internet sites, specifically viewing machine level monitoring and historical data, without logging into the host. A web page either served from the host or a seperate monitoring server can report vital data from other machines to the monitoring staff. This may include a 24x7 Network Operations Center or other support staff that may not have shell access to the machine. As web sites grow larger and larger, simply logging into one or two of the machines and typing a command to get the current status would rely on your memory to recall the previous administrative check. Of course, MRTG tracks data, by the day, week, month and year. Monitoring or system adminstrative staff can rely on MRTG monitoring vital services to reveal something "out of the ordinary". Current data, past hours, days, or weeks could then be examined to reveal a problem, symptom or trend. Monitoring staff can then page or contact a technical engineer with some information as to what is going on with the web, application or database server. Application level information can also be fed and monitored via MRTG such as Ethan Post's Oracle Monitoring Scripts, again, to be looked at by first level response staff. What I have doneI have setup freely available scripts that capture data on this web server (RH Linux on Intel) to monitor the information in yellow:
LoadNumber of usersDisk space usageNetstat informationRoot and "nobody" processesUser processesTotal number of processes Network trafficExamples Running Nowupdated 2006

Monitoring and Technical Staff Response