# Recommendations for traffic and system monitoring

## nonamey

Can anyone give me recommendations for a traffic and system monitoring tool? I've looked at: cacti, mrtg, rtg, cricket, vnstat, nagios and ntop, but, lacking experience, I don't know the pros/cons of each, particularly for my needs.

Monitoring will be done on a firewall (PII-300MHz, 128M ram) for a home network. Ideally I would like to monitor aggregate traffic, traffic totals over day/week/month, traffic broken down by client, and most importantly traffic by traffic shaping queue (l7-filter + tc). Basic system monitoring would also be nice.

Thanks for any help.

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## ikaro

mrtg its prolly the most used and the oldest.

Ive used mrtg in the past, and tried cacti once - mrtg its far more easy to setup than cacti.

so, id say mrtg.

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## njcwotx

I have used Ntop and just getting started with Nagios.

Nagios is hard to start from scratch as I am still tyring to finure out some things after I got it installed.  Its more of a service and server monitoring tools as far as I can tell.  You can monitor web pages, ssh availability, services, and hardware issues.

However, ntop is very easy to get going. Just emerge and run from command line.  It is a good quick traffic analyzer giving bandwidth host totals.  I love it.  Helped me quickly see things like a Citirx config error that was casing massive bandwidth use over our WAN, users streaming audio all day long wasting bandwidth, and what users were doing and downloading.  Its not the perfect or even the best tool out there, but for a piece of open source software that take minutes to get going without any configuration, its certainly worth adding to your list of tools.

Have not looked at mrtg yet, probably will soon though.

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## r00d00

Has anyone any further thoughts on this?

Nagios was my first choice but its masked heavily for amd64  :Sad: 

So has anyone any ideas on alternatives?

Thanks

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## njcwotx

Since my last August post, I have gotten Nagios to run and MRTG integrated into the web site.  It works really well now I have the hang of it.  I even got some rrd graphs going in Ntop.  I havent used cacti yet, bet I have seen screenshots and it looks good.

Each tool is a different tool and they more compliment each other rather than compete.

Nagios will poll servers and devices using an array of common tools.  Examples are ping tests, monitoring of certain server stats such as disk space and cpu usage and more, it can even accept traps from snmp.  Really, it can be configured to run about any test or accept any trap and display/notify the result.

Ntop is more of a network logger, it will track each host seen and where they are connecting to.  It will show how much data passes and what type of traffic.  It even has some rrd capability.

MRTG is a graph generator based on snmp.  Has a few utils to help the admin create the web page that displays the graphs.  It was pretty easy to add a button into Nagios and now other admins can click on and see the traffic and cpu usage of various routers across the WAN.

Cacti looked promising, but I have not set that one up yet.

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## njcwotx

as far as unmasking nagios, its stable enough in our environment if your worried its going to crash.

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## nielchiano

I'm logging my servers with rrdtool and some custom perl scripts. Most polling happens using SNMP, which is fairly standard.

rrdtool is kind of mrtg-next-gen. It's written by the same guy, and works wonderful. But you do need some manual scripting to get it to work. If someone is interested, I'll gladly share my scripts

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