[mrtg] How to setup the mrtg for monitoring more things

[Steve Shipway]

Asking how to configure MRTG to monitor generic things is a very open-ended question, due to the flexibility of MRTG.

For any SNMP-enabled device, there should be a manual showing the OIDs and their contents.  The MRTG documentation will give details about how to configure for various OIDs.

There are examples on the MRTG website, but of course there are so many different things out there that it is not possible to give instructions for everything.  Some templates for the cfgmaker command are available for download, and some utilities like cfgmaker-host and cfgstoragemaker are available to probe an SNMP-enabled server for commonly-known OIDs and generate the appropriate configuration files.

By far the best thing to do is to start of simply, configuring to monitor network traffic, and then work your way up once you understand the Target definition syntax and cfgmaker templates more thoroughly.  There are a lot of resources available online but you need to understand the basics before building up to the more complex configurations.

In a shameless act of self-promotion, I'd like to let you all know that in a month or two a new book will be published, "Using MRTG with RRDtool and Routers2", which will hopefully be of great use to people wanting to get a MRTG installation working and also to those who want to use the more advanced features.  Advance copies will be available at a discount at LISA08 in San Diego (reserve yours now!)  Final price is likely to be about US$25-US$30.

Steve