Network bandwidth monitoring - CHR router os

gianry · February 8, 2025, 9:03pm

Hi,
I’d like to know if it is possible to have a bandwidth management like Unifi .
I’m using a routerOs by mikrotik.

grant2 · February 9, 2025, 2:15pm

Welcome @gianry to the Grafana Community Forum.

Yes, Grafana can monitor bandwidth usage from your MikroTik router, similar to Unifi, by collecting network traffic data. I would suggest creating instances of Prometheus or InfluxDB+Telegraf if you have not done so already.

Here’s a rough outline of how you can achieve this using Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana. Here’s how:

Step 1: Enable SNMP on MikroTik

Log into your MikroTik router and enable SNMP:

/snmp set enabled=yes

You can also specify a community (e.g., “public”):

/snmp community add name=public addresses=0.0.0.0/0

Step 2: Install and Configure Telegraf

Telegraf will collect SNMP data from MikroTik and send it to InfluxDB.

Install Telegraf on your monitoring system.
Edit the Telegraf configuration file (telegraf.conf):

[[inputs.snmp]]
  agents = ["udp://192.168.88.1:161"]  # Replace with your router's IP
  community = "public"
  version = 2
  timeout = "5s"
  retries = 3

[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  name = "interface_in_octets"
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifInOctets.1"
[[inputs.snmp.field]]
  name = "interface_out_octets"
  oid = "IF-MIB::ifOutOctets.1"

Restart Telegraf:

systemctl restart telegraf

Step 3: Store Data in InfluxDB

Ensure you have InfluxDB installed and running.
Telegraf will automatically send SNMP data to InfluxDB.

Step 4: Visualize Data in Grafana

Add InfluxDB as a data source in Grafana.
Create a new dashboard and use the following Flux query to visualize bandwidth:

from(bucket: "telegraf")
  |> range(start: -1h)
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r._measurement == "snmp")
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r._field == "interface_in_octets" or r._field == "interface_out_octets")

Use time-based transformations to calculate bandwidth usage (convert octets to Mbps).

This setup will allow you to monitor bandwidth usage in real time with historical data, much like Unifi.

gianry · February 9, 2025, 4:49pm

@grant2
I’ve very happy to use Grafana and I appreciate your help.
now I’ve a mini pc with debian and CasaOs. I’ve installed Grafana and prometheus but I didn’t found a solution . I think I’ll go to use Telegraf and influxDB.

By the way … do you know the way to collect data for the traffic identification ? like in the unifi dashboard I’ve mentioned up ?

thanks a lot

yosiasz · February 9, 2025, 5:32pm

Have you configured Prometheus to scrape your network traffic? Can you share your prom config?

Other options

gianry · February 9, 2025, 5:42pm

where is the prom config ?

gianry · February 9, 2025, 5:43pm

At this point I’ve found this

root@casaos:/home/casaos# systemctl restart telegraf
Job for telegraf.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status telegraf.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

root@casaos:/home/casaos# systemctl status telegraf.service
● telegraf.service - Telegraf
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/telegraf.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sun 2025-02-09 12:37:20 EST; 17s ago
       Docs: https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf
    Process: 288712 ExecStart=/usr/bin/telegraf -config /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf -config-director>
   Main PID: 288712 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
        CPU: 248ms

Feb 09 12:37:20 casaos systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Feb 09 12:37:20 casaos systemd[1]: Failed to start Telegraf.
Feb 09 12:37:20 casaos systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Feb 09 12:37:20 casaos systemd[1]: Stopped Telegraf.
Feb 09 12:37:20 casaos systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Feb 09 12:37:20 casaos systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Feb 09 12:37:20 casaos systemd[1]: Failed to start Telegraf.
...skipping...

yosiasz · February 9, 2025, 5:44pm

For now maybe you can try out telegram as recommended by @grant2

gianry · February 9, 2025, 5:47pm

ok but as you can see telegraf doesn’t start

yosiasz · February 9, 2025, 6:21pm

Did you follow the docs?

Can you share how you configured telegraf

gianry · February 9, 2025, 6:37pm

I’ve installed using Install from the InfluxData repository

and I received this error

systemctl restart telegraf

Job for telegraf.service failed because the control process exited with error code.

See "systemctl status telegraf.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

gianry · February 9, 2025, 9:25pm

@grant2

is it necessary to change this too?

  ## Token for authentication.
  token = "$INFLUX_TOKEN"

yosiasz · February 10, 2025, 12:02am

Best to read doc

gianry · February 10, 2025, 8:46pm

Ok,
I read but I asked something else. Is it necessary to change the telegraf conf at the point as on my previous screenshot ?

gianry · February 10, 2025, 9:22pm

this is the debug result … I 've followed the instructions wrote yesterday:

Feb 10 16:19:16 CasaOS systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Feb 10 16:19:16 CasaOS systemd[1]: Stopped Telegraf.
Feb 10 16:19:16 CasaOS systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Feb 10 16:19:16 CasaOS systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Feb 10 16:19:16 CasaOS systemd[1]: Failed to start Telegraf.
root@CasaOS:/home/casaos# telegraf --config telegraf.conf --test
2025-02-10T21:20:15Z I! Loading config: telegraf.conf
2025-02-10T21:20:15Z E! loading config file telegraf.conf failed: open telegraf.conf: no such file or directory
root@CasaOS:/home/casaos# telegraf --config /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf --test
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Loading config: /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Starting Telegraf 1.33.1 brought to you by InfluxData the makers of InfluxDB
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Available plugins: 236 inputs, 9 aggregators, 33 processors, 26 parsers, 63 outputs, 6 secret-stores
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Loaded inputs: snmp
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Loaded aggregators:
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Loaded processors:
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Loaded secretstores:
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z W! Outputs are not used in testing mode!
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z I! Tags enabled: host=CasaOS
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z W! [agent] The default value of 'skip_processors_after_aggregators' will change to 'true' with Telegraf v1.40.0! If you need the current default behavior, please explicitly set the option to 'false'!
2025-02-10T21:20:56Z E! [telegraf] Error running agent: could not initialize input inputs.snmp: initializing table interface: translating: exec: "snmptranslate": executable file not found in $PATH

gianry · February 11, 2025, 9:33pm

after a long night studying I realized that something missing - I had to snmp MIB plugin.
Now I’ve another issue . this is what I see in Grafana

yosiasz · February 11, 2025, 11:32pm

what are we looking at here?

gianry · February 12, 2025, 7:59pm

Grafana dashboard . I followed the instructions as in the first reply of this topic.
I’m not educated for such thing of tools. I asked how to replicate a Unifi dashboard and in other forum someone wrote to use Grafana.

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Network bandwidth monitoring - CHR router os

Step 1: Enable SNMP on MikroTik

Step 2: Install and Configure Telegraf

Step 3: Store Data in InfluxDB

Step 4: Visualize Data in Grafana

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