We’re looking for a good way to take our bandwidth usage from web servers, database servers, and mail servers and do monitoring so that we can answer questions like:
- How much bandwidth is site www.example.com using (hourly, daily, monthly, yearly)
- See historical graphs and trends of said bandwidth
Do tools already exist? Is the best place for monitoring on the servers? at the router? as a silent observer?
Check out cacti. I’ve been using it to monitor bandwidth on an ftp server that serves up 15+ TB per month and it does everything you asked for here.
Thanks for the advice, I’ve looked at Cacti many times, but never gotten around to trying it. Thanks for bringing it back up!
-David
I’ve used MRTG in the (distant) past.
http://www.mrtg.com/
The new kid on the block seems to be Nagios.
http://www.nagios.org/
Thanks Charles!
We use both MRTG and Nagios. I hadn’t really considered Nagios for this exact need as I’m looking more at trending than at Red/Yellow/Green. This is normally where Ganglia comes to the rescue, but I’m trying to see if something helps me break out the traffic into groups without doing the work myself.
My colo provider also uses Cacti. I can send screenshots if you’re interested.
Zabbix and Hyperic.
Hyperic is a little easier to configure (certainly the docs are better) but Zabbix has proven extremely customizable, it’s just a little ugly out of the box.