Monitor your network traffic with MRTG

MRTG is the Multi Router Traffic Grapher, a piece of free software released under the GNU General Public License. In the middle of a crisis, or when you are debugging an immediate network problem, MRTG will allow you to view the traffic patterns of many networks at once and quickly determine if one or more is experiencing an abnormal traffic load. The fact that the graphs display the history of the network is key.

In practice, it can be difficult to tell from immediate bandwidth and packet-per-second counts alone whether a network is operating normally. If a 100 Mbps link is carrying 85 Mbps of traffic, is this heavy but normal use or is the network straining under an attack? By having the history of the network available, you can look for sudden changes that might account for an operational problem. A denial-of-service attack that attempts to exhaust the available bandwidth on a network nearly always presents as a sudden, sustained increase in traffic levels; the attack...

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

RELATED CONTENT Network Monitoring University tackles large-scale 802.11n wireless network management Meru reinvents wireless LAN troubleshooting and management Green enterprise: Three networking investments that make a difference Network device management overload: Engineers managing too many boxes What preventative maintenance procedures for network devices exist? WLAN QoS and SLA monitoring with 7/24 Wireless Quality Assurance costs How important are network infrastructure maps for engineers or admins? Understand Windows tracert output to troubleshoot network connectivity Network management and monitoring market remains crowded, fragmented When do applications suffer from poor network performance? Network Monitoring Research Routing and Switching How to test LAN switch energy efficiency Testing LAN switch power consumption: A best practices guide Dynamic IP routing and routing protocols How routers work: An overview for networking pros Secure Cisco routers against IOS flaw attack Network summarization -- Supernetting and wildcard masks Routing: Five common, easily avoided errors Router Expert: Building a WLAN proxy server, implementing ASR Router Expert: Building a WLAN proxy server, implementing WPAD Cisco IOS IP routing: Static routes

RELATED GLOSSARY TERMS Terms from Whatis.com − the technology online dictionary 10-high-day busy period  (SearchNetworking.com) ACK  (SearchNetworking.com) baseboard management controller  (SearchNetworking.com) call failure rate  (SearchNetworking.com) jam  (SearchNetworking.com) Jini  (SearchNetworking.com) maximum segment size  (SearchNetworking.com) maximum transmission unit  (SearchNetworking.com) netstat  (SearchNetworking.com) network tracking tool  (SearchNetworking.com)

RELATED RESOURCES 2020software.com, trial software downloads for accounting software, ERP software, CRM software and business software systems Search Bitpipe.com for the latest white papers and business webcasts Whatis.com, the online computer dictionary

ers do not have much to gain by slowly ramping up the attack over a period of time.

When you are not tending to an immediate problem, MRTG is useful for studying trends in traffic on your network. It will help you understand how traffic is distributed across your network, plan capacity needs for the future, and so on.

While MRTG is most often used to collect data from router interfaces, it can also collect traffic data from switches or servers. In this way, you can monitor the bandwidth use of a particular machine. In fact, MRTG can be configured to collect any statistical data that a device makes available via SNMP.

MRTG is available at http://www.mrtg.org/. It relies on a few pieces of software not included in the distribution. In particular, it requires:

• Perl 5.005 or greater
• The GD library
• The PNG library
• The zlib library

You will not need external SNMP software because MRTG comes with its own SNMP implementation. Install documentation is available from the doc/ directory in the distribution, but on a modern Linux system, MRTG will build without any special instructions.

Read more about MRTG and see graphical examples at InformIT.

Rate this Tip To rate tips, you must be a member of SearchNetworking.com. Register now to start rating these tips. Log in if you are already a member. DISCLAIMER: Our Tips Exchange is a forum for you to share technical advice and expertise with your peers and to learn from other enterprise IT professionals. TechTarget provides the infrastructure to facilitate this sharing of information. However, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or validity of the material submitted. You agree that your use of the Ask The Expert services and your reliance on any questions, answers, information or other materials received through this Web site is at your own risk.