Question about Switch Monitoring and Host Groups

[Box293]

I have used the switch montioring wizard and quite like the Bandwidth graphs that are produced for each port (in and out traffic).

Is it somehow possible to setup a bandwidth service (for a particular port) that is assigned to a host group (that host group contains all the hosts you want to perform the bandwidth monitoring on for that specific port) instead of being assigned directly to a host?

I ask this because of the following scenario:

• We have multiple sites that all have the same SonicWALL firewalls
  Each SonicWALL always has Port 1 as the WAN port and Port 3 as the LAN port
  Each time we connect a new site we run the switch monitoring wizard, we are doing the same thing over and over again

I was thinking that I could cut out some of the initial setup steps (and human typing errors) by:

• Adding the host first
  Add the host to the common host group
  Having a service for port 1 and a service for port 3
  Assign these services to the common host group
  Each time I add a new host I just add it to the common host group and it will do the required bandwidth monitoring

I've had a play to see if I can make this work but I think there is more going on in the background than just simple host group membership.

Basically the Status Information I get when I try this is "var/lib/mrtg/10.152.89.114_1.rrd does not exist."

I assume that the switch wizard does some stuff in the backend to setup some stuff.

Is there any way I can achieve what I am talking about here (using host groups), or do I need to run the switch wizard each time?

[admin]

This is possible and you are on the right track.

The piece that is missing for you right now (and the piece that the switch wizard does behind the scenes) is to add the switch to MRTG's configuration.

Take a look at the MRTG config file (/etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg). You will see the entries for the switches that were monitoring using the switch wizard. The switch wizard uses the MRTG "cfgmaker" command to scan for ports on the switch, and then adds the information to the MRTG config file.

You can run the cfgmaker command manually for the switches you want to monitor and then add them to MRTG. Within 5 minutes, the RRD files should be populated and your service checks should work.

Hope that helps!

[Box293]

Thanks for that, I'll have a play around and see how I go.