MRTG-FAQ(1)                    mrtg                   MRTG-FAQ(1)



NAME
       mrtg-help - How to get help if you have problems with MRTG

SYNOPSIS
       MRTG seems to raise a lot of questions. There are a number
       of resources apart from the documentation where you can
       find help for mrtg.

FAQ
       Alex van den Bogaerdt <alex@ergens.op.Het.Net> maintains
       the MRTG FAQ website on

        http://faq.mrtg.org

       In the following sections you'll find some additonal Fre-
       quently Asked Questions, with Answers.

       Why is there no "@#$%" (my native language) version of
       MRTG?

       Nobody has contributed a @#$%.pmd file yet. Go into the
       mrtg-2.10.13/translate directory and create your own
       translation file.  When you are happy with it send it to
       me for inclusion with the next mrtg release.

       I need a script to make mrtg work with my xyz device.

       Probably this has already been done. Check the stuff in
       the mrtg-2.10.13/contrib directory. There is a file called
       00INDEX in that directory which tells what you can find in
       there.

       How does this SNMP thing work

       There are many resources on the net that explain SNMP.
       Take a look at this article from the Linux Journal by
       David Guerrero

        http://www.develnet.es/~david/papers/snmp/

       And at this rather long document from CISCO.

        http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ito_doc/snmp.htm

       The images created by MRTG look very strange.

       Remove the *-{week,day,month,year}.png files and start
       MRTG again.  Using MRTG for the first time, you might have
       to do this twice. This will also help when you introduce
       new routers into the cfg file.

       What is my Community Name?

       Ask the person in charge of your Router or try 'public',
       as this is the default Community Name.

       My graphs show a flat line during an outage. Why ?

       Well, the short answer is that when an SNMP query goes out
       and a response doesn't come back, MRTG has to assume some-
       thing to put in the graph, and by default it assumes that
       the last answer we got back is probably closer to the
       truth than zero.  This assumption is not perfect (as you
       have noticed).  It's a trade-off that happens to fail dur-
       ing a total outage.

       If this is an unacceptable trade-off, use the unknaszero
       option.

       You may want to know what you're trading off, so in the
       spirit of trade-offs, here's the long answer:

       The problem is that MRTG doesn't know *why* the data
       didn't come back, all it knows is that it didn't come
       back.  It has to do something, and it assumes it's a stray
       lost packet rather than an outage.

       Why don't we always assume the circuit is down and use
       zero, which will (we think) be more nearly right?  Well,
       it turns out that you may be taking advantage of MRTG's
       "assume last" behaviour without being aware of it.

       MRTG uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to
       collect data, and SNMP uses UDP (User Datagram Protocol)
       to ship packets around.  UDP is connectionless (not guar-
       anteed) unlike TCP where packets are tracked and acknowl-
       edged and, if needed, retransmitted.  UDP just throws
       packets at the network and hopes they arrive.  Sometimes
       they don't.

       One likely cause of lost SNMP data is congestion; another
       is busy routers.  Other possibilities include transient
       telecommunications problems, router buffer overflows
       (which may or may not be congestion-related), "dirty
       lines" (links with high error rates), and acts of God.
       These things happen all the time; we just don't notice
       because many interactive services are TCP-based and the
       lost packets get retransmitted automatically.

       In the above cases where some SNMP packets are lost but
       traffic is flowing, assuming zero is the wrong thing to do
       - you end up with a graph that looks like it's missing
       teeth whenever the link fills up.  MRTG interpolates the
       lost data to produce a smoother graph which is more accu-
       rate in cases of intermittent packet loss.  But with
       V2.8.4 and above, you can use the "unknaszero" option to
       produce whichever graph is best under the conditions typi-
       cal for your network.

AUTHOR
       Tobias Oetiker <oetiker@ee.ethz.ch>



2.10.13                     2004-01-19                MRTG-FAQ(1)
