Multi Router Traffic Grapher

MRTG

Developer(s)	Tobi Oetiker
Stable release	2.17.4 / January 12, 2012
Written in	Perl
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Bandwidth monitor
License	GNU General Public License
Website	oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is free software for monitoring and measuring the traffic load on network links. It allows the user to see traffic load on a network over time in graphical form.

It was originally developed by Tobias Oetiker and Dave Rand to monitor router traffic, but has developed into a tool that can create graphs and statistics for almost anything.

MRTG is written in Perl and can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS and NetWare.

MRTG uses the (SNMP) to send requests with two object identifiers (OIDs) to a device. The device, which must be SNMP-enabled, will have a management information base (MIB) to look up the OIDs specified. After collecting the information it will send back the raw data encapsulated in an SNMP protocol. MRTG records this data in a log on the client along with previously recorded data for the device. The software then creates an HTML document from the logs, containing a list of graphs detailing traffic for the selected devices in the server..

Alternatively, MRTG can be configured to run a script or command, and parse its output for counter values. The MRTG website contains a large library of external scripts to enable monitoring of SQL database statistics, firewall rules, CPU fan RPMs, or virtually any integer-value data.