[mrtg] MRTG and Cisco SAA/RTTMON

[Bjorn Nordbo]

A few months ago I made some inquiries about measuring data from
Cisco SAA/RTTMON with MRTG. I have received several requests from
people about weither I found any solution to this. To those I have
not answered, consider this posting to be your answer.

After some research, I found that doing anything but very simple
data collection was difficult using only MRTG. In order to utilize
most of the features of SAA, the program needs to (1) set up probes,
(2) keep some state about the probes, (3) restart probes if needed
(timeout, reload) and (4) read data from hourly groups.

My first approach was a daemon doing everything, which turned out
to be a bad one. To those of you who have received the code, I
would not recommend using it except for an example of how to *not*
do it..

My second approach was hacked together the night before the dead-
line by me and my boss. It consists of three separate programs,
saa_config, saa_install and saa_collect. Their roles are:

saa_config  - configure new probes based on config files, storing
               the config in two db-files.
saa_install - installs the probe on the router based on the config
              in the db-files, and restarts/reconfigures probes if
              necessary.
saa_collect - checks if the probe has started a new hourly group,
              and collects the newest *complete* hourly group. the
              data is stored into RRD's.

The two first programs are running every hour, while the last one
is running every ten minutes. I use my own system for displaying
data (originally based on 14all.cgi),

The data must (as far as I know) be sampled with a resolution of
one hour, and only complete hourly groups should be collected.
The resulting graphs aren't that spectacular, but I have attached
one measuring round trip time from one router to another. Observe
that "max" is rttMonStatsCaptureCompletionTimeMax, and not the
MAX RRA.

The system seems to be working fairly well, and it *might* be
possible to run saa_collect from MRTG, although this is not as
elegant as the current solution.

However, as I have not developed this alone, and have used my
employers time to make most of the code, I will have to ask for
permission to release it and if this is granted the code must
be made a little more generic before it can be released.

I will post a message on this list when I have discussed this
with my boss. If he agrees to release the code, I will probably
have something releasable within a month (depending on my own
hollidays).

Best regards,
-- 
Bjørn Nordbø  -  Network Development  -  Nextra Norway

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