14.15. Monitoring Remote Hosts

Problem

All of this monitoring of your local system is OK, but what you really want to do is set up an MRTG server to monitor remote servers and routers. How do you do this?

Solution

The hosts you wish to monitor either need to have built-in SNMP agents, or they must have Net-snmp installed. Virtually all modern networking devices have built-in SNMP agents. Linux and Unix servers need Net-snmp.

For configuring your Linux hosts, follow Recipe 14.2, Recipe 14.3, and Recipe 14.4.

Then, in mrtg.cfg, you need to change the Target line to point to your remote host, like this:

	Target[uberpc.disk]: dskPercent.2&dskPercent.3:password@uberpc

And of course, fiddle with the legends and page titles so you know what graph belongs to what.

Discussion

Be sure to review the SNMP Recipes to learn how to test and troubleshoot MRTG's SNMP queries, because if SNMP doesn't work, MRTG won't work.

You only need an SNMP agent on your remote hosts; they don't need an HTTP server or MRTG.

See Also