[mrtg] Re: RIPE stats & MRTG

[Matt Walkowiak]

Sorry, but I cannot give you the answer you need.  I looked back in my Mrtg
Archives - when I first responded to this person's e-mail, I was really
asking for more information.  At the time I had no clue who or what RIPE
was.  A lot of time when people write into these forums they provide WAY too
little information, and I thought this person had done that.

ANYWAY, that being said, I know what RIPE and LIR are now, and I think I
know what you and this other person are asking for, and as far as I know,
MRTG is not the quick and easy answer you are looking for...

As I and many others have written, Mrtg is NOT magic.  All it does is use
the Target line to get information, specifically 2 (or 4,depending on how
you look at it) numbers, insert them into a .LOG file, and update all the
lines currently in the .LOG file (as well as the .OLD file).  It also passes
that log file to Rateup to build the .PNG files, and builds the .HTML files
to display everything.  My point is, Mrtg will only graph and plot numbers
that YOU give it.  If those numbers are available from some device that will
respond to SNMP, then Mrtg has a built in way to grab the data using SNMP.
When taken to it's trivial extreme, Mrtg will plot a constant number, if you
turn the "Options[asdf]: gauge" on with "Target[asdf]: 3&3."  I haven't
actually tried this, but I am pretty sure it'll work.

So, long story short, you will probably need to write some sort of script to
collect the data; Mrtg is just a nice way for you to report it to whoever
might be asking for it.  Read thru the docs on the www.mrtg.org page -
especially the ones talking about how the .LOG files work, and what kind of
numbers Mrtg expects.  It's really not too hard to write an external
program - it just has to end with four lines:
#!/usr/bin/perl
...
some code that stores numbers into variables, $dataI and $dataO
...
print "$dataI\n";
print "$dataO\n";
print "0\n";
print "0\n";
where $dataI and $dataO are two numbers you want to plot (you can see the
3rd and 4th numbers are always zero, in this case.)

Hope that will help you out...

Matt Walkowiak





>
> Hi Matt,
>
> I came across your post, while searching for details about what you are
also
> trying to do.
>
> I submitted an IP request as an LIR, and the hostmaster asked me to
provide
> usage stats on a regular basis. He says it could be done with MRTG.
Although
> Ive used MRTG in the past, ive got no idea how this can be done. there
must
> be an external script to gather this info from my network, which im not
> happy about.
>
> Did you gather more info on how this is done, and are you doing this ?
>
> What sort of stats are you providing RIPE
>
>
> Thanks for any feedback
>
>
>
> Cheers
>
>
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Matt Walkowiak wrote:
>
> >
> > > Ripe asked us to make statistics showing IP address usage or amount of
> > > customers that use the service
> >
> > Who's Ripe?  What kind of a device or service do you want to monitor?
> >
> > > The statistics should show the following :
> > >
> > > - - - - the IP capacity for each area
> > > - - - - the IP usage for each area (min/avg/max on a
> > > daily/weekly/monthly)
> > > They said i can do that by MRTG
> > > How i can do that?
> >
> > MRTG does indeed create historical graphs for the data you collect.  I
> would
> > suggest getting ahold of a spare computer, installing either NT/2000 or
> some
> > flavor of unix, then following the directions under the correct
> > "Installation Guide" for the OS you choose.
> >
>
>

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