Monitoring and instrumentation

• Monitoring is the process of checking if a given system works as expected
• Instrumentation is the process of collecting data from a device (link utilisation, CPU utilisation, RAM, disk, …)

The two are related to each other.

TODO

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• Icinga
• nodewatcher, an open source network planning, deployment, monitoring and maintenance platform with emphasis on community.

• Munin

TODO

Alternative is to use a simpler channel like HTTP. SNMP is sometimes too big/bloated for small routers.

Round-robin database engine

Or use some client-side drawing library, like django-datastream.

Collectd is a nice little program that is able to collect various data on a system, and either write them to a rrdtool database, or send them via the network (or both).

It runs on OpenWRT: statistic.collectd. This is quite nice with the network-based reporting of the collected data (because you probably don't want to store rrdtool database directly on your OpenWRT routers).