# Nagios network traffic monitoring plugin for FreeBSD



## pdns (Oct 10, 2017)

Is there a network traffic plugin for Nagios on FreeBSD? Something that can measure transit bytes rate and receive bytes rate?


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## usdmatt (Oct 10, 2017)

I graph network traffic in Cacti by just installing net-snmp on my FreeBSD machines and using standard snmp support like any other network device.


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## pdns (Oct 10, 2017)

usdmatt Do you have alerting on network traffic? I am looking more into alerting based on network traffic rather than graphing.


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## SirDice (Oct 10, 2017)

It's fairly easy to write a custom script for Nagios. You can get most of the info you're looking for with netstat(1) (specifically look at the -I option).

Personally I prefer Zabbix as it's pretty much a combination of Nagios and Cacti. With Zabbix it's really easy to add thresholds to alert on.


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## usdmatt (Oct 10, 2017)

I would expect it to be not too difficult to get Nagios to query an snmp device and alert based on it. Surely it's a fairly common requirement to alert based on traffic for a switch/router/etc. (although it's slightly tricky with network throughput as you really need to look at the differences between readings to know what the throughput is). I only use Nagios for basic service (http/ping/smtp/etc) monitoring.

As SirDice says you can also just write a simple script that pulls the info from FreeBSD and outputs the relevant string and exit code depending on the result.


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## pdns (Oct 10, 2017)

Thank you SirDice and usdmatt


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## SirDice (Oct 10, 2017)

usdmatt said:


> As SirDice says you can also just write a simple script that pulls the info from FreeBSD and outputs the relevant string and exit code depending on the result.


Yeah, that's what I would do. But I like to use SNMP solely for network devices that have no other way to get statistics. But, as you say, it can be enabled of course and would provide a fairly 'standard' way of monitoring bandwidth usage.


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