[mrtg] MRTG Possible to perform metrics to one Host/Destination instead of a Router?

[Furosh One]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Steve Shipway <s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz>wrote:

>  Yes, you can do this, but it is a bit more complicated.  Here’s a way to
> achieve it.
>
>
>
> First, write a plugin for NRPE (exit status 0, output one line of text
> containing number) that can collect the metrics you’re interested in.  For
> example, a small script that downloads a file from a specified location and
> times the transfer, then returns the transfer time in seconds for each of
> the two sites as two separate values in the output text.  NOTE: Your plugin
> should ALWAYS exit in less than 30 sec.
>
>
>
> Install a small testing satellite server at the various locations you wish
> to test from.  If you have VMWare then a VM would be perfect.  On this
> server, install the Nagios NRPE agent, and this new plugin, and configure
> NRPE to accept commands from your MRTG server.
>
>
>
> On your MRTG server, install mrtg-nrpe (comes with the Routers2 software,
> in C or Perl).  For each remote server, configure a Target that uses
> mrtg-nrpe as a data collection plugin to query the remote NRPE and run the
> NRPE plugin you designed at the start.  This returns a pair of values in
> seconds which you can graph.  Make good use of the Forks: directive to
> ensure that your checks all complete within the 5min window.
>
>
>
> And voila, you have a graph of FTP performance form each site, with the
> ‘in’ and ‘out’ lines being the response times of your two FTP servers!
>   You can use a similar method to create plugins to monitor other network
> protocols.
>
>
>
> We have done something similar for remote monitoring of mail queues.
>
>
>
> Feel free to email me directly if you’d like a bit more help with this.
>
>
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
>
> *Steve Shipway*
>
> ITS Unix Services Design Lead
>
> University of Auckland
>
> Floor 2, 58 Symonds Street
>
> *09 3737599 ext 86487*
>
>
Thanks for your response Steve, I appreciate your feedback but you're right
about it being a bit complicated.

Another issue is that I'll be connecting to several Linux machines across
our WAN which have NIS so I can login with my mounted home directory and
perform the testing that I need to do. However, I don't have root/sudo
access on some of these machines and requesting this may take more time that
what I have available for testing.

So if running this without sudo/root access is achievable with not too much
effort I think I can give it a shot, otherwise I may need to try to resort
to other networking benchmarking tools.

What do you think?

-Regards,
FuRoSh.
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