How to integrate Hobbit and MRTG 🔗 link

I've been playing about with MRTG today, and found out that adding
MRTG graphs to the Hobbit set of graphs was a very simple task.
Since this is probably something that others can use, I've written 
up a short description of how to do it:
http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/help/hobbit-mrtg.html

The short story is that you can configure MRTG so that it stores its
datafiles in RRDtool format directly into the directory where Hobbit
looks for all of the other RRD files for a host. So with a "mrtg"
entry in the hobbitgraph.cfg file and an extra entry for "mrtg" in
hobbitserver.cfg's GRAPHS setting, I've got the MRTG graphs showing up
as normal Hobbit graphs on the "trends" page:

http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit-cgi/bb-hostsvc.sh?HOSTSVC=fenris,hswn,dk.trends&IP=172.16.10.254&DISPLAYNAME=fenris.hswn.dk
(a bit down that page, 3rd and 4th last graphs)

The detailed view is here:

http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit-cgi/hobbitgraph.sh?host=fenris.hswn.dk&service=mrtg&first=1&count=1&action=menu


I did make one simple tweak to the Hobbit code for this - hobbitgraph
normally bundles graphs into bunches of 5, which doesn't work well for
the MRTG graphs. So I made the "5" configurable so I could get one
graph per network interface.


I think it's neat :-)


Henrik

Nice work henrik. I was just working the bb mrtg script from deadcat,
but this looks like a better way to go.

Now you just need to get hobbit to make toast in the morning...

On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 17:48:54 +0100, Henrik Stoerner <user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 11:54:30AM -0500, Kevin Grady wrote:

Thanks!

Now you just need to get hobbit to make toast in the morning...

For that specific task, I have a much better solution.


Henrik

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 05:48:54PM +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

A patch against Hobbit RC6 is avaiable at
http://www.hswn.dk/beta/postRC6-mrtg.patch

This adds the "mrtg" entry to hobbitgraph.cfg, changes the default
"GRAPHS" setting in hobbitserver.cfg (just add ",mrtg::1" to the entry
in your file), and makes bb-larrdcolumn recognize the "::1" syntax for
Hobbit.

Install with 
   cd hobbit-4.0-RC6
   patch -p0 </tmp/postRC6-mrtg.patch
   make

Then stop Hobbit, do "make install" as root, and start Hobbit.


Henrik

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 11:07 AM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] How to integrate Hobbit and MRTG

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 05:48:54PM +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

A patch against Hobbit RC6 is avaiable at
http://www.hswn.dk/beta/postRC6-mrtg.patch

This adds the "mrtg" entry to hobbitgraph.cfg, changes the default
"GRAPHS" setting in hobbitserver.cfg (just add ",mrtg::1" to the entry
in your file), and makes bb-larrdcolumn recognize the "::1" syntax for
Hobbit.

Install with 
   cd hobbit-4.0-RC6
   patch -p0 </tmp/postRC6-mrtg.patch
   make

Then stop Hobbit, do "make install" as root, and start Hobbit.


Henrik

Will this interfere with bbmrtg.pl?
I am currently using it with mrtg-rrd.cgi to generate graphs as needed.

On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 17:48 +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

That's ok for a few, but it won't scale terribly well.  I have over 5000
points that I am currently monitoring with mrtg.  I have that broken
down into a three tier directory structure (region - site - device),
with all of the thresholds and alerting from bbmrtg.pl.

Is there a way I can point to my existing rrd directory structure for
the graphing bit - which bbmrtg.pl doesn't do terribly well - but still
keep my stuff in its nice hierarchy?

user-290ce4e24e19@xymon.invalid 03/23/05 12:37 PM >>>

I'd agree.  If you've got less than ~100 systems/devices, this would be fine.  If you want to do much more than that, you'll want a separate hobbitgraph process to handle this.

Is there a way I can point to my existing rrd directory structure for the graphing bit - which bbmrtg.pl doesn't do terribly well - but still keep my stuff in its nice hierarchy?

Sure, leave it up to you to find a way to make things difficult, eh?  LOL!

I've tried this a couple of way without much luck.  I'll be working on it tonight to see if there's a way...there's got to be a way...

Paul

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 11:25:43AM -0600, Milburn, John A. wrote:

I dont think it will interfere. 

First, it only triggers if you actually configure MRTG to save the
data it collects in an RRD-file in the Hobbit directory. Not something
you would do by accident, I think.

Second, the way bbmrtg.pl works (as far as I know) is to send a status
message that includes links directly to the MRTG-generated graphics.
It doesn't use the Hobbit graph-tool.

So I don't think there will be any problem in using bbmrtg.pl with
Hobbit after this.


Henrik

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 11:37:19AM -0600, Daniel J McDonald wrote:

OK, I haven't user-183fc83ac81e@xymon.invalid in much detail, and it clearly does
a lot more than just provide access to the graphs.

Hmm ... well, hobbitgraph.cgi is actually fairly agnostic about what
kind of data it gets. If you've got data in RRDtool format, it should
be possible to generate the graphs with that.

(Note - I just checked the hobbitgraph.cgi man-page, and it's missing
some updates. There's an extra CGI parameter that is needed to
actually make it do something. I'll get that updated).

If you have an RRD file /var/lib/foo/mydata.rrd that you want to
graph, then you call hobbitgraph.cgi with

REQUEST_URI="" \
QUERY_STRING="host=something&service=mydata&graph=hourly&action=view" \
    hobbitgraph.cgi --rrddir=/var/lib/foo 

Normally when hobbitgraph.cgi runs as a CGI script, REQUEST_URI is
setup automatically.

For this to work, you must have a graph definition in hobbitgraph.cfg
that defines how a "mydata" graph is generated. The "service"
parameter is used as a key into the hobbitgraph.cfg definitions.


Regards,
Henrik