[rtg] [verizon] Fwd: Results with RTG

[John S. Coxen]

I'll let others answer 1 through 4 but as for question 5, when I was
last using RTG, I ran a cron job that rebuilt the config files every
morning about 6:00 AM.  They were rebuilt off of a simple text file that
I edited as necessary to add new equipment.  Since I was doing this for
a med-large Telco provider, I was adding or deleting equipment fairly
often.  Once the rebuilt was done, my cron job would kill the RTG
processes and restart them.  BTW, this also solved the memory leak in
question 1.

Also, in your last paragraph, you asked for examples of companies that
used RTG.  I was working for TelCove when I started running RTG.  Later,
TelCove was bought by Level 3 Communications and I continued running RTG
there until they finished integrating the billing and network monitoring
systems.  It's a good stable platform though.  My serves haven't had any
maintenance since I moved out of that role over 2 years ago and they're
still running.  No one is adding or deleting equipment from that text
file I mentioned but the config files still rebuild every morning and
the RTG iterations still restart.

John

Harry Marcson wrote:
> We are looking to integrate RTG into our system, because it seems to
> be the only option for our setup. We are looking to poll about 100
> switches, connecting about 2000 servers.
>
> Our current RTG testing results for 1 switch polling showed us that RTG:
>
> 1- Seems to have memory leaks, not new news after reading through the
> mailing list, but was wondering how people are surviving with this,
> especially the ones with the bigger setups. did you apply any specific
> patch such as yahoo rtg (yrtg) or own fixes?
> 2- Has really boring and bad-looking graphs. Good graphs would be the
> ones that are from Cacti for example.. If anyone has a better
> rtgplot.cgi or improved graphing code, please do share it!
> 3- Bugs in the graphs. A simple example is a server that got a 800Mbps
> DDOS attack and got nullrouted.. RTG did not move the line near the
> 0Mbps, when it crashed. The end result is, once the server was
> restored a few hours later, the graph line went down to the actual
> usage of about 10Mbps, but showed that during the nullroute a 800Mbps
> usage.
> 4- Makes matching the actual switch port with the RTG device id a bit
> of a hassle. Has anyone come up with a solution for that?
> 5- Lacks automation when it comes to discovering new devices. Adding
> switch ips is an easy one, but how to run rtg targetmaker.pl every
> time a new server is added to a switch, aswell as restarting the RTG
> process is a more difficult one.
>
> I am also very interested in knowing wether any big companies are
> utilizing RTG for their bandwidth monitoring or billing. I saw in the
> mailinglist that Layeredtech, Gnax, Savvis are some examples. Any
> others that would like to convince us that RTG is worth it in the long
> run?
>
> Harry
>
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