Introduction
Cisco®
introduced support for the new Cisco Unified Firewall MIB in Cisco IOS®
Software Release
12.4(6)T. The Cisco Unified Firewall MIB provides a Simple Network Management Protocol
(SNMP) interface to monitor various firewall counters by network-management utilities such as
Ipswitch’s What’s Up Gold, Solarwinds Orion, and the popular network monitoring tool, MultiRouter
Traffic Grapher (MRTG).
About MRTG
MRTG is a free performance management application for Unix/Linux and Microsoft Windows. It
monitors SNMP statistics from any SNMP-capable device on your network and:
● Captures, stores, and graphically presents SNMP data on a Web interface. By default, a
Webpage with four graphs per MIB object identifier (OID) is created by MRTG. The graphs
show the variation of MIB data over time.
● Runs automatically on a user-defined schedule in *nix cron or Windows Scheduler.
Periodically, MRTG queries a user-configured list of SNMP objects on one or more network
devices. After each data collection cycle, the MRTG software posts updated graphs to a
Webpage.
● Efficiently compresses and archives data samples to create graphs.
● Enables you to determine if trending data is useful for monitoring your environment before
you invest in network performance software. If trending data is beneficial for your network
management, you may need to purchase a commercial network monitoring package, such
as HP OpenView or Computer Associates Concord eHealth. However, you may find that
MRTG is all you need.