Using rrdtool to generate server load & bandwidth graphs

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:32:25 +0000

I’ve been using MRTG and routers2.cgi for years to graph the various aspects of a server that warrant monitoring. I’ve long known that they used something called rrdtool to do… well, something, but never had a need or desire to figure out exactly what that was.

But, having just moved my site to a new server, I was curious how the server would handle the load. Rather than setting up some behemoth like Nagios or Zabbix, which are full monitoring/alerting suites, I just wanted graphing. As I said, in the past I’ve used MRTG or routers2.cgi for this but both of them were overkill for me in this case. Since both of them used rrdtool, I figured that was a good place to look.

Running MRTG cfgmaker across your entire subnet?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:00:30 +0000

I realized recently that I had a bunch of newly-provisioned VMs that weren’t being monitored by MRTG (one of the tools we use to monitor network usage and other fun stats). Rather than manually run cfgmaker against all the new machines, I decided to script my way out of this.

Step 1: Build a list of hosts to monitor

For this I used an nmap ping test to generate a list of “up” hosts:

Mrtg on Evan Hoffman

Using rrdtool to generate server load & bandwidth graphs

Running MRTG cfgmaker across your entire subnet?