[mrtg] Re: MRTG data into Excel

[Daniel J McDonald]

On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 09:54, Scott Coleman wrote:
> How can I get the MRTG data into an Excel spreadsheet automatically without
> doing it manually?
step one: delete mrtg
step two: write a poller that creates xls files and doesn't do any
round-robin roll ups.

mrtg has a specific function.  If you don't need a screwdriver, go build
a wrench instead.

Now, if you insist on using mrtg as your poller, and you are running
rrdtool as your backend, you can write a little perl script to read an
RRD and generate a CSV file with the essential information.  But
remember that rrdtool/rateup summarize their data every day (or whatever
you have set the length to be on rrdtool).  That's the whole beauty of
the system.

>   And can MRTG calculate/measure packet loss, latency and
> availability or just total through put?

How do you measure packet loss?  I'm not being flip here, but there are
no counters that you can poll that say "I lost this many packets".  You
can count interface discards, I suppose, but that's not a real loss
measurement because it is per link, not for a whole system.  And if the
packets are dropped because they are munged...  well you could look at
fcs errors or some such, but that's not going to be 100% accurate either
- if you could figure out what the packets were supposed to be so that
you can count them, then you wouldn't drop them in the first place...

Latency?  Same deal.  What counters do you poll to find out the latency?

Availability?  Well...  Ditto.

Now, do I measure some of those things?  Yes, I run Big
Brother/bbgen/larrd and it collects latency and availability stats for
me based on its polling, and tosses the information into a nice rrd file
for me. Packet loss is still a black hole, though.

-- 
Daniel J McDonald, CCIE 2495, CNX
Austin Energy


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