Creating a jail to act as a Network Management/Monitoring System?

[n3mmr]

Would it be reasonable to set up a jail under FreeNAS to perform Net-SNMP+MRTG-based monitoring of a network with around 20 - 30 SNMP Agents (mostly HP & EdgeCore Switches and a ZyWall Firewall/Router)?

(This is then NOT a question about the FreeNAS box being an SNMP agent, but about a FreeNAS jail performing the query function)

Has anybody else managed to do this?? What would you need to install?
Any stories of horror or bliss?

Why would I want to do this? Well, I have just managed to get a jail running as tftp server in the very network I want to monitor, so I'm sort of on a roll.

 

[m0nkey_]

Yes and I've done it. Just install MRTG and Net-SNMP, create a MRTG config and put it in a cron job. Just make sure it executes in cron with LANG=C otherwise it fails to run.

 

[n3mmr]

I (basically) got it running. Rather straightforward, mainly.

HOWEVER, in viewing the generated index file (indexmaker generated it) I see some overly long titles for each little graph.

I set it up as 6 cols and set the --width to 100, and I had used the --subdirs=SNMPNAME_HOSTNAME cfgmaker option.

The titles look like "Traffic Analysis for 5 -- V1-TP23-25" and I would rather have it say V1-TP23-25:5 or something as short and to the point. In this, V1-TP23-25 is the SNMPNAME.
HOSTNAME is the IP address.

 

[n3mmr]

BTW, I set mrtg up as a daemon, option RunAsDaemon: Yes, Interval: 5 in the config file.
Works a charm! And you lose the process startup cost.

 

[m0nkey_]

Good to know you got it working. You'll have to refer to the MRTG documentation.

 

[n3mmr]

the MRTG documentation is scant and unclear.

Maybe we ought to go with Munin or Cacti.... ;-)