Hi folks,
I been having a thought and I wanted to run it by y'all to see if I'm on a sane path.
Currently we use nagios to monitor our stuff and a combination of mrtg and cacti to collect data for trend analysis. We would like to keep our monitoring/snmp traffic to a minimum if possible. So here is my thought.
We could configure nagios to monitor and collect perf data along the way. I mean via active checks and not by using other tools in nagios like NRPE. Basically nagios would write the perf data to a file and another script would process that data and enter it into rrd files.
Now we want to build graphs of this data. I don't want to write a custom web interface so I'd rather use MRTD/RRDTool and routers2.cgi. I think I could configure MRTG to not really collect any data (in the [Target] definition) by having run something like '/bin/true'. Or configure MRTG to parse the perf file(s) created by nagios would be another option.
This setup would allow us to get real time monitoring and yet save that data for trend analysis. If it matters, this is a mix of routers, load balancers, switches and several hundred servers. So what do you think? Would data being collected from active nagios checks be okay? Would it be better to have MRTG parse the files generated by nagios or to have another script parse them and build the rrd files?
Any input is appreciated.
thanks,
mikeS