[mrtg] MRTG

[Craig Humphrey]

Hi Al,

I think you're a bit confused here.

MRTG is generally for monitoring network usage (volume/bandwidth) on network switches/hubs (a happy side effect of using SNMP and scripts is that you can actually monitor just about anything if you really want to).

What you're talking about is IP based accounting.  You want to find out how much traffic a given IP address is generating (and/or what kinds of traffic).

If you have SNMP access to the device that is using that IP address, you can use MRTG to retrieve this information from the device.  However, this isn't really a scalable solution (though MRTG will handle hundreds of monitoring points, given sufficient hardware).

A better approach is to use a network sniffer based product.  An example FOSS (Free Open Source Software) product would be ntop (www.ntop.org) which can use a SPANned/mirrored port on your switch or an sFlow stream, to do IP accounting.

There are many other products out there that do IP based accounting, ntop just happens to be one I've used in the past.

Hope that helps.

Regards
Craig


-----Original Message-----
From: mrtg-bounces at lists.oetiker.ch [mailto:mrtg-bounces at lists.oetiker.ch] On Behalf Of Al Grant
Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2008 7:22 PM
To: mrtg at lists.oetiker.ch
Subject: Re: [mrtg] MRTG


>You sure can, as long as the device being monitored supports SNMP.

When you say the device being monitored, you mean the router?

-Al


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