[mrtg] Re: MRTG and QuickPage

[Roy S. Rapoport]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 03:10:58PM -0300, xzhao2 wrote:
> I'm now working on integrating QuickPage into MRTG (or vice versa), meaning by 
> reading the data from MRTG log file every 5 minutes and comparing with some 
> thresholds, QuickPage is automatically triggered and a message is sent to a 
> cellphone or pager. Anybody has any idea to do this? Thanks. Simon

Honestly? Don't.

Well, that's a little too strict, but here's what I mean:

MRTG does something really, really well.  What it does well is collecting
and managing historical data; with the addition of some tool to graph the
data, MRTG becomes a powerful way for you to know both how some resource is
doing right now and whether how it's doing now is normal or abnormal (/var
is at 82%! Oh, it's been increasing at 1%/week for a few weeks now, OK).  I
*LOVE* MRTG, and I use it heavily.

However, it's not IMHO a very good alerting and fault detection system.  These
things are built into it, but they're very rudimentary and basic.

I believe one is better served by using a product that is designed to do
alerting from the ground up for that functionality; here (and at various
other places where I've implemented it) we use Nagios; as an example, you
can see either the Nagios site (www.nagios.org) or my own instance, at
nagios.inorganic.org (log in as guest/guest).  Nagios, in a word, rocks.
Its design is incredibly sophisticated; it allows for very fine
granularity; it allows for the concept of time-based reporting (email me if
it's during business hours; page me otherwise); it allows for notification
escalation (wow, there've been five notifications with no response.  Time
to let management now).  It lets you put the whole configuration (almost)
in a database.  Did I mention it rocks?

-roy

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