mrtg-logfile - description of the mrtg-2 logfile format
This document provides a description of the contents of the mrtg-2
logfile.
The logfile consists of two main sections.
- The first Line
- It stores the traffic counters from the most recent run of mrtg.
- The rest of the
File
- Stores past traffic rate averages and maximum at increasing
intervals.
The first number on each line is a unix time stamp. It represents
the number of seconds since 1970.
The first line has 3 numbers which are:
- A (1st column)
- A timestamp of when MRTG last ran for this interface. The timestamp is the
number of non-skip seconds passed since the standard UNIX
"epoch" of midnight on 1st of January 1970 GMT.
- B (2nd column)
- The "incoming bytes counter" value.
- C (3rd column)
- The "outgoing bytes counter" value.
The second and remaining lines of the file contains 5 numbers
which are:
- A (1st column)
- The Unix timestamp for the point in time the data on this line is
relevant. Note that the interval between timestamps increases as you
progress through the file. At first it is 5 minutes and at the end it is
one day between two lines.
This timestamp may be converted in OpenOffice Calc or MS Excel
by using the following formula
=(x+y)/86400+DATE(1970;1;1)
(instead of ";" it may be that you have to use
"," this depends on the context and your locale settings)
you can also ask perl to help by typing
perl -e 'print scalar localtime(x),"\n"'
x is the unix timestamp and y is the offset in
seconds from UTC. (Perl knows y).
- B (2nd column)
- The average incoming transfer rate in bytes per second. This is valid for
the time between the A value of the current line and the A value of the
previous line.
- C (3rd column)
- The average outgoing transfer rate in bytes per second since the previous
measurement.
- D (4th column)
- The maximum incoming transfer rate in bytes per second for the current
interval. This is calculated from all the updates which have occurred in
the current interval. If the current interval is 1 hour, and updates have
occurred every 5 minutes, it will be the biggest 5 minute transfer rate
seen during the hour.
- E (5th column)
- The maximum outgoing transfer rate in bytes per second for the current
interval.
Butch Kemper <kemper@bihs.net> and Tobias Oetiker
<tobi@oetiker.ch>