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                 Sys Admin Magazine -- News and Reviews
                         November 13, 2003

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RRDTool, in conjunction with MRTG, is valuable for presenting 
SNMP data in innovative ways. In this article, Denenberg focuses on 
using RRDTool’s advanced features and expanding the functionality of 
the SNMP package net-snmp. 

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Advanced SNMP Monitoring with RRDTool
by Adam Denenberg 

In today's economy, monitoring devices via SNMP is crucial to 
determining where bottlenecks may exist, and where we may have 
placed too much capacity. Many network-monitoring tools have evolved 
to handle SNMP data, but these have all been based around the work 
of one tool -- MRTG. MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) allows you 
to visually graph and trend anything imaginable out of SNMP, no matter 
what the data represents. MRTG has been around for about a decade, 
and most systems or network engineers are probably graphing something 
with it. While MRTG is an important tool, RRDTool (another tool 
written by the author of MRTG), is going to be the main focus of 
this article. 

RRDTool is an underutilized tool that, in conjunction with MRTG, can 
be used to present your SNMP data in some innovative ways. This 
article assumes you have a working knowledge of MRTG, and will focus 
on taking RRDTool and SNMP to the next level by using RRDTool's 
advanced features and expanding the functionality of the SNMP package 
net-snmp. I will illustrate how easy it can be to create custom graphs 
to provide information via SNMP (not available out of the box as an 
OID) simply by adding a few options to the SNMP daemon configuration 
file. Most importantly, I will examine using RRDTool to create custom 
arrangements of SNMP data to provide new insights into our 
infrastructures. 

To read the complete article, visit:
http://click.sysadmin.email-publisher.com/maabE1Eaa18bxa2sokSb/

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administrators. Each issue has a theme, but we’re always interested in 
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Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and other UNIX/Linux variants. 

* Enterprise Administration -- We’re looking for practical, high-end 
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