An Overview of MRTG

The Big Picture

Multi Router Traffic Grapher is designed primarily for tracking bandwidth utilization on routers. It can be hacked into dealing with other things, but tracking bandwidth is what it does best. It can create daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs for tracking trends. When used with RRDTool you can create the graphs on demand and customize their look more easily.

The Backend

MRTG 2.x is designed around PERL and a C program that updates the data files and creates the static graphs. Newer versions support the use of RRDTool, which MRTG 3.0 will be based on. RRDtool allows for graphs to be created on demand, thus decreasing the time required to query hosts.

Configuration

Configuration of MRTG is simple, but if you have a lot of routers you will probably want to use a script to generate it. It gets tedious otherwise. ;)

The End Result

When you have it running you can monitor your bandwidth and have data to show you need that budget increase for more bandwidth or that your most annoying site doesn't. You can see it in action at the author's demo site: http://www.stat.ee.ethz.ch/mrtg/

Related URLs:

Home page: http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html
RRDTool: http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/

If you have an suggestions, comments, or corrections, please let me know.

Valid HTML 4.0!
scottm@octaldream.com
Oct 12, 2000