> In a message dated: 20 Dec 2002 09:30:15 EST > Ben Boulanger said: > > >Have you considered using SNMP already? > > Yes, but I don't believe it provides me with anything I don't already have.
SNMP makes it very easy to get the data into MRTG/RRDtool > > >Using that with MRTG and maybe some outside tools (you could write a > >script that returns a number for MRTG to graph) you may be able to > >accomplish a fair amount of what you're going for. > > I believe that the SNMP DiskIO MIB polls the information from iostat, > and hence, would be nothing more than a middle-man for information I > already have direct access to. That's not really the point. SNMP makes it easy for MRTG to gather the info into a central database. And produce graphical reports > In addition, to use SNMP, I'd have to install apache, the mibs, the > snmp tools, gnuplot, and who knows what else. Unfortunately, with > all this crap, I begin to affect the very performance I'm trying to > measure :( Well... You need SNMP agents on all the clients. On the one system running MRTG, you need perl, a bunch of perl packages, cron jobs and disk space. You can run a browser on the MRTG pointing at the directories. Or run apache to access it remotely. MRTG is fairly low impact on the server and clients. It's also a great way to get running data averaged over a long time. > > Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong and told that SNMP has some > magical powers or otherwise 'all-access pass' into Disk IO > metrics that iostat is incapable of providing, and therefore, it's > worth going around and installing all this stuff on the 64+ nodes to > get this information :) It's not going to get you more info then you can get directly. But it's *much* easier to gather. Especially if you want data on more then 2-3 systems. When I was doing network admin, I had an MRTG graph of every switch and hub my servers were attached to as well as the routers and our outbound connection. When users said the network was slow, I could point at the bandwidth hogs. I could also do some load balancing based on historical data; I swapped users between hubs and switches. I also graphed my servers. NetApp has a MIB to work with MRTG to graph its data btw. It took about 2 minutes to add a router/switch port/server to the system. Your choice: custom written scripts to gather data, centralize it, generate reports and graphs, and trim old data. You're still going to need to put thaqt script on all your nodes. Or install SNMP agents everywhere, set up a server to gather the data with MRTG and create reports for you. If you take your time, probably a day to setup for all 64 nodes. Management likes the pretty graphs too. MRTG's database is static size too. If your nodes are Solaris, Virtual Adrian is a good tool too. I don't think it's on anything else though. MRTG will work with anything that has an SNMP agent on it. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
