Diagnose and manage your network for free with Linux and open source tools

David M Williams
Monday, 30 July 2007 08:15

Business IT - Open Source

MRTG

To finish up, let's check out MRTG. You can get a sense of the popularity of this well-known graphing system by Googling its graphs.

At the heart of MRTG ("Multi Router Traffic Grabber") is to show just what your router is doing all day. In fact, it was borne out of a need; the original author had a single 64kbit link at his site and everyone was curious to know the network load at any given time because it affected their web browsing or downloads or mail delivery or other Internet traffic. Out of this rose MRTG.

MRTG will monitor any SNMP-compliant network device and produce graphs showing how much traffic has passed through each interface. MRTG may not be installed on your Linux distro but it is freely obtained from http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/.

The graphs produced by MRTG are embedded into web pages which can be viewed on any browser. These pages can have their access restricted to just specified people or groups or, commonly, they can be published on public web pages for the general interest of others.

Where MRTG will work for you is by giving you complete visibility of the traffic patterns of many networks at once. You can quickly determine if one or more is demonstrating an inconsistent or problematic pattern by comparing instantaneous graphs with long-term graphs. Additionally, you can understand whether your network is meeting the demands put upon it, when the best time for planned link outages will be and so on.

With Linux and these free open-source tools at your disposal you'll be the master of your domain, no matter whether you deal with a home or business network. If you know these utilities, you can use them anywhere, anytime.