Keene Enterprises :: Open Source

Open Source :: MRTG High Speed

MRTG for High Speed interfaces (mrtg_hs) was created to solve some fundamental problems with MRTG and current High Capacity SNMP counter implementations:

MRTG polls every 5 minutes to determine the speed of an interface using SNMP ifInOctets and ifOutOctets (SNMP Counter32 objects). This causes problems with interfaces that can send data at rates greater 100 megabits/sec because they can exceed the maximum value of the counter (2³² octets, or 4gigabytes) in less than 5 minutes and MRTG will not be able to determine this has happened and will report erroneously low values. MRTG High Speed will make attempts to detect and correct the overflow situation and report the correct value while still only polling every 5 minutes.
High Capacity counters (ifHCInOctets and ifHCOutOctets, SNMP Counter64 objects) which are 64bits wide were added in SNMP v2C. MRTG does not use SNMP v2C, and thus those OIDs are not polled for. In addition many devices have buggy High Capacity counter implementations. MRTG High Speed will also not use High Capacity counters by default because of their wide-spread failures. Instead it will error-correct the regular counters.
MRTGs graphs can only be averaged values, not a collection of highs or lows. MRTG High Speed aims to make this a configurable option.
MRTG doesn't draw any relationship between the devices (and indeed there may sometimes be no relationship). MRTG High Speed will have an option to draw relationships between devices and be able to use that data draw a heirarchial display of network devices.
MRTG is written in Perl. MRTG High Speed will be written in C and distribute precompiled binaries for most common platforms (Solaris/sun4u, Linux/sparc64, Linux/ia64, Linux/x86_64, Linux/alpha, Linux/i386, Linux/ppc, Linux/parisc, NetBSD/i386, NetBSD/sparc64, FreeBSD/i386, OpenBSD/i386, Windows/i386, MacOS X/ppc, HP-UX/parisc)

Due to the number and invasiveness of changes that would be required to fix MRTG and the fact that some of these changes oppose to the fundamental concept and design of the current MRTG, a new version is being designed and written from scratch.
There are some other projects that attempt to use the High Capacity counters with MRTG and Cricket:

junipoll -- MRTG replacement designed to work with Juniper routers and High Capacity counters.
genRtrConfig -- Cricket configuration maker that uses High Capacity counters.

Available for download:

Package: MRTG High Speed (mrtg_hs) Version: 0.0.1 File: mrtg_hs-0.0.1.tar.gz Size: 61 KB	OS: Any Platform: Any Package: Source tarball
Description: MRTG High Speed is MRTG that works with high speed interfaces. MD5: fc2237f56b062235225aa528704b16da