# What is Monitor.SunnyLine.co.za?

Monitor is a bandwidth monitoring system implemented by SunnyLine Internet Services.

With the use of Monitor! we allow our customers to see real-time statistics about their bandwidth usage. Monitor creates detailed graphs based on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly bases, graphing your in- and outgoing bandwidth usage. Monitor also aids in the detection and prevention of Network Congestion (or lag), by allowing Network Administrators to see possible network bottlenecks before they actually happen.

Monitor is a value added services from SunnyLine Internet Services for all of their Leased Line clients with permanent connections. Due to the manner in which Network Data is being monitored, we are unable to provide information on dial-up ports. At least for now.

MRTG consists of a Perl script which uses SNMP to read the traffic counters of your routers and a fast C program which logs the traffic data and creates beautiful graphs representing the traffic on the monitored network connection. These graphs are embedded into WebPages which can be viewed from any modern Web-browser. In addition to a detailed daily view, MRTG also creates visual representations of the traffic seen during the last seven days, the last four weeks and the last twelve months. This is possible because MRTG keeps a log of all the data it has pulled from the router. This log is automatically consolidated, so that it does not grow over time, but still contains all the relevant data for all the traffic seen over the last two years. This is all performed in an efficient manner. Therefore you can monitor 50 or more network links from any halfway decent UNIX box.

MRTG is not limited to monitoring traffic though, it is possible to monitor any SNMP variable you choose. You can even use an external program to gather the data which should be monitored via MRTG. People are using MRTG, to monitor things such as System Load, Login Sessions, Modem availability and more. MRTG even allows you to accumulate two or more data sources into a single graph.

©2000 Chris Knipe. All Rights Reserved.

Tobias Oetiker <oetiker@ee.ethz.ch> and Dave Rand <dlr@bungi.com>