lists.netmrg.net

EricInHouston · Beginner Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 2

Hi!

Not trying to be a pain here, just seriously curious as to why? What is different about NetMRG compared to MTRG? Is it easier to set up and configure? I assume that it's not reinventing the wheel, so why is it needed?

EricInHouston

silfreed · Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2003 10:21 pm Post subject:

Wow. I never really thought of that as a FAQ since we've been using it for so long.

There's a number of reasons; the reason we needed to get away from MRTG was simple: it killed servers for us (literally). We had hundreds of switch and router interfaces to graph, and writing five files every time it ran (four images plus the database file) killed hard disks ; not to mention the CPU load it put on our box to run MRTG several times every minute to get everything gathered.

NetMRG's gatherer is written in C++, and uses the next-generation database RRDTOOL written by the same person that wrote MRTG. Since the gatherer is written in C++, it's very fast. In addition to gathering data from SNMP sources, it can grab values out of MySQL tables or run custom commands.

Performance-wise, there's no comparison. We are able to monitor 2500+ items on our network in less than a minute; that includes updating all the RRD (database) files! You're not killing your hard disk by writing out thousands of files either; only the database file is written out - the images are created on-the-fly when you need to view the data.

Setup and configure-wise, we don't have cfgmaker, but everything is configurable via the web. You can select what interfaces you want to graph very easily (multiple ones at a time as well) - and NetMRG will even update the descriptions of the interfaces when it runs, if you want it to (unlike cfgmaker which requires you to run it by hand).

Let us know if you have some more specific questions. Feel free to browse around the demo site also; it might help you to understand what we're all about.

-Doug

EricInHouston · Beginner Joined: 18 Dec 2003 Posts: 2

Thanks for the reply! That answers my question beautifully!

I will definitely look over the program and ask a couple of colleagues to check it out. We're watching a lot of stuff with MRTG, and anything that helps with server load is definitely of interest!

Regards,
EricInHouston