[ntp:questions] Meinberg M200 remote monitoring

[lars]

Hi!

I am looking for a good method to monitor my Meinberg M200 GPS unit.
I think SNMP would be the best, but i could not find the exact OID's for NTP offset, jitter etc.
Meinberg delivered the MIB files on the USB stick but i cannot find it through the maze of OID's.

I would like to poll the NTP server and then make an RRD and then plot an image on my webpage with the statistics.

If anybody has an RRD template, don't hesitate to send it to me :)

[David Taylor]

Post by lars
Hi!
I am looking for a good method to monitor my Meinberg M200 GPS unit.
I think SNMP would be the best, but i could not find the exact OID's for NTP offset, jitter etc.
Meinberg delivered the MIB files on the USB stick but i cannot find it through the maze of OID's.
I would like to poll the NTP server and then make an RRD and then plot an image on my webpage with the statistics.
If anybody has an RRD template, don't hesitate to send it to me :)

You could walk the MIB with a tool such as GetIF or SNMPtester:

http://www.wtcs.org/informant/getif.htm
http://www.paessler.com/tools/snmptester

or similar for your own OS. SNMPtester includes a tool for converting
MIB files into a format it can read, and then it can report in plain text.

[Jochen Bern]

Post by lars
I am looking for a good method to monitor my Meinberg M200 GPS unit.

[...]

Post by lars
I would like to poll the NTP server and then make an RRD and then
plot an image on my webpage with the statistics.
If anybody has an RRD template, don't hesitate to send it to me :)

Throwing an RRD template your way doesn't make much sense until it has
been pinpointed what data you can get from the unit, what software you
use to retrieve it and stuff it into RRD files (*), and the potential
(re)format(ting) issues along that chain.

(*) Examples: MRTG and Cacti as "traffic" recording tools (data will be
collected in very regular intervals); Nagios, Naemon, Icinga, Shinken,
... with some "performance data backend" add-on (NDO/IDO, PNP4Nagios,
n2rrd, InGraph, ...) as dedicated monitoring solutions (frequency of
requests will increase when something is amiss); just take "snmpget"s
and "rrdtool update"s, roll a shell script, and put it into the crontab;
various commercial, SNMP-aware network management/monitoring tools, if
you happen to already have one; .......

... and note that the tool that creates the graph *to put onto your
webpage* could still be a bare "rrdtool graph", instead of whatever
mechanism is provided along with the "collector" solution.

Regards,
J. Bern

[David Taylor]

Post by lars
Hi!
I am looking for a good method to monitor my Meinberg M200 GPS unit.
I think SNMP would be the best, but i could not find the exact OID's for NTP offset, jitter etc.
Meinberg delivered the MIB files on the USB stick but i cannot find it through the maze of OID's.
I would like to poll the NTP server and then make an RRD and then plot an image on my webpage with the statistics.
If anybody has an RRD template, don't hesitate to send it to me :)

I should perhaps have mentioned that I use MRTG, but using the "ntpq"
command and parsing its output:

http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/NTPandMRTG.html

as the SNMP modules for ntpd.exe haven't yet been ported to Windows.

[Jason Rabel]

Post by David Taylor
I should perhaps have mentioned that I use MRTG,
but using the "ntpq" command and parsing its output

That is what I do too... If the meinberg unit is running NTPD (I've seen several commercial units do that with their own custom
refclock) it would probably be easier to parse the data you want from either querying the server or grabbing some log files.

I like to log the following into graphs:

Packets in / out
Frequency
Offset & Jitter
Time Dispersion

[David Taylor]

Post by Jason Rabel

Post by David Taylor
I should perhaps have mentioned that I use MRTG,
but using the "ntpq" command and parsing its output

That is what I do too... If the meinberg unit is running NTPD (I've seen several commercial units do that with their own custom
refclock) it would probably be easier to parse the data you want from either querying the server or grabbing some log files.
Packets in / out
Frequency
Offset & Jitter
Time Dispersion

Packets in and out from a box are the default variables MRTG is designed
for, and can be had from FreeBSD, Windows & Linux systems. Frequency,
offset & jitter, and dispersion you should be able to get by parsing
"ntpq -crv" output as my Web site shows.

[Jason Rabel]

Post by David Taylor
Packets in and out from a box are the default variables MRTG is designed
for, and can be had from FreeBSD, Windows & Linux systems. Frequency,
offset & jitter, and dispersion you should be able to get by parsing
"ntpq -crv" output as my Web site shows.

I'm talking NTP only packets, not all packets.

You can get that info from "ntpdc -c iostats"

[David Taylor]

Post by Jason Rabel
I'm talking NTP only packets, not all packets.
You can get that info from "ntpdc -c iostats"

So you could parse that with a Perl script and use MRTG to monitor.

BTW: I tried your command on my Windows compiled NTP but got "no
response received" from either a Linux, FreeBSD or Windows system. But
perhaps that's the default security.

[David Lord]

Post by David Taylor

Post by Jason Rabel
I'm talking NTP only packets, not all packets.
You can get that info from "ntpdc -c iostats"

So you could parse that with a Perl script and use MRTG to monitor.
BTW: I tried your command on my Windows compiled NTP but got "no
response received" from either a Linux, FreeBSD or Windows system. But
perhaps that's the default security.

Same here

$ ntpdc -c iostats
localhost: timed out, nothing received

but

$ ntpq -c iostats
time since reset: 313782
receive buffers: 10
free receive buffers: 9
.....

ntp-dev-4.2.7p444 NetBSD/6.1_STABLE


David