Stuff you can do quickly with MRTG (that has nothing to do with router traffic)

Come on, everyone knows MRTG, right? That venerable tool for graphing router traffic, among other things. If you’ve worked as a sysadmin and/or network admin in the past, you’re probably familiar with it since decades ago, although these days you probably use something more modern, such as Cacti, Zabbix, etc..

The thing is, I still use MRTG a lot, old though it is, and even though there are many newer alternatives, since MRTG has, to me, one huge advantage. Well, two, in fact, though they really amount to one thing: ease of use. MRTG is simple: it doesn’t need to run as a daemon, it’s just a binary you can run through cron. And MRTG is versatile: unlike other tools that really, really want to work with network traffic, or system memory, or processor usage, or something else (preferably to be read through SNMP, or a local agent), MRTG just wants one or two values, and it’ll call the first one “input” and the second “output”. And those values can come from anywhere.

Just to show how easy it is: an MRTG configuration file usually looks something like this:

WorkDir:/var/www/htdocs/ptmail/

Refresh: 36000

Target[ptmail]: `/usr/local/bin/getptmail.sh`;
Options[ptmail]: growright, nopercent, integer, noinfo, gauge
MaxBytes[ptmail]: 12500000000000
kilo[ptmail]: 1000
YLegend[ptmail]: MB used / Emails
ShortLegend[ptmail]:  
LegendI[ptmail]:  MB used (uncompressed):
LegendO[ptmail]:  Emails:
Title[ptmail]: MB used / Emails
PageTop[ptmail]: <h1>MB used / Emails</h1>

XSize[ptmail]: 500
YSize[ptmail]: 250
XScale[ptmail]: 1.4
YScale[ptmail]: 1.4

Timezone[ptmail]: Europe/Lisbon

The key part is that “Target” line which, you’ll notice, is between backticks, meaning that it’ll actually execute a script. And what does it expect from that script? Simple: just four lines:

• A number (which it’ll think of as “input”, and which will typically be graphed in green)
• Another number (for “output”, to be graphed in blue)
• The system’s uptime (on Linux, uptime | cut -d ” ” -f 4-7 | cut -d “,” -f 1-2 typically provides it in the format MRTG wants, although it’s really just text)
• The system’s name (just use uname -n)

That’s it! If you only want to graph a single value, just add “noi” or “noo” to the Options line (and you can then replace the first or second line, respectively, with “echo 0” on your script). You can also make it not show the uptime and name with the “noinfo” option. And, finally, the “gauge” option makes MRTG graph current values, while, without it, it adds the current value to the previous one (like, for instance, a “bytes transferred” counter). Both have their uses.

Now, you’re probably thinking: “yeah, yeah, I’ve known how to use MRTG for decades (and these days I use XYZ instead; who even uses MRTG in 2017?!?); why are you writing about something so basic and, well, old?” The answer is, again, 1) that it’s ridiculously easy to use (just create a script to write 4 lines), and 2) that it’s not for routers (or network interfaces) only; it can be used for so much else, and it can typically be done in minutes. So I’ll just show a few examples of stuff I already do with it on my servers. Each example will be just the shell script; the MRTG configuration file for these is virtually always the same thing, except for axis legends, labels, etc..

Note: all of the following need the “gauge” option.

“Steal” time on a VPS

#!/bin/bash

# Graphs "steal" time on a VPS. A high value means you need to complain to your
# VPS provider that the host your server is on is overbooked, or there's
# another customer abusing it (mining Bitcoins? :) )

NUM=$((3 + ($RANDOM % 3)))

rm -f /tmp/steals.txt

top -b -n $NUM | grep Cpu | cut -d ',' -f 8 | tr -d ' ' | cut -d 's' -f 1 > /tmp/steals.txt

TOTAL=0 ; for i in `cat /tmp/steals.txt`; do TOTAL=`echo "$TOTAL + $i" | bc -l`; done

AVERAGE=`echo "$TOTAL / $NUM" | bc -l`

echo 0
echo $AVERAGE
uptime | cut -d " " -f 4-7 | cut -d "," -f 1-2
uname -n

Total size and number of emails in a Maildir

#!/bin/bash

# Total size and number of mails in a Maildir

# total UNCOMPRESSED size of your mailbox, in MB, 2 decimal cases
# actual compressed size will probably be much lower; if you'd rather show it,
# just replace the following with a "du -ms /home/ptmail/Maildir | cut -f 1"
find /home/ptmail/Maildir -type f | grep drax | cut -d '=' -f 2 | cut -d ',' -f 1 > /tmp/sizes-ptmail ; perl -e "printf \"%.2f\n\", `paste -s -d+ /tmp/sizes-ptmail | bc` / 1024 / 1024"

# number of emails
find /home/ptmail/Maildir -type f | grep drax | wc -l

uptime | cut -d " " -f 4-7 | cut -d "," -f 1-2
uname -n

System load (* 100) and number of processes

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php

# Graph system load (multiplied by 100) and number of processes.

# Yes, this is trivial and uses mostly shell commands. :) It's just to show
# that "scripts" invoked by MRTG can be in any language (in this case, PHP),
# not just shell scripts. You could even use compiled C code, for instance.

$x = exec ("uptime | cut -d ':' -s -f 5 | cut -d ',' -f 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 2");

$x*=100;

print $x . "\n";

system ("ps ax | wc -l");

system ("uptime | cut -d ' ' -f 4-7 | cut -d ',' -f 1-2");
system ("uname -n");

?>

Average time per request of a URL

#!/bin/bash

# Average time per request of the URL below. Run it locally to measure how fast
# your site and/or server is, or remotely to measure its network connection as well
# (though that would be less reliable; best use something like Pingdom)

# use "noi" for this one (hence the first "echo 0")

echo 0
ab -c 4 -n 100 -k https://zurgl.com/ | grep "Time per request" | head -n 1 | cut -d ':' -f 2 | tr -d ' ' | cut -d '[' -f 1

uptime | cut -d " " -f 4-7 | cut -d "," -f 1-2
uname -n

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea. 🙂