Monitoring MikroTik Routers and Switches with MetricFire

To integrate MikroTik Routers and Switches and MetricFire, please reach out to MetricFire. Book a demo with the MetricFire team to discuss integrating MikroTik Routers and Switches and MetricFire, and see how that benefits your monitoring system.

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. We enable you to use Hosted Graphite and aesthetic custom dashboards to visualize your metrics so you can understand what is happening.

MetricFire offers users a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of popular open-source monitoring software services: Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and Kubernetes. You get all these within a hosted environment as a single product. Not only does MetricFire fit well into the infrastructure monitoring use-case, such as network monitoring and server monitoring, but we also do application monitoring and business intelligence.

Through this hosted environment, MetricFire boosts the unique features of open-source projects to give you more functionality than the original products. Below are some of the MetricFire features at a glance: 

• Cloud Monitoring
  
  
• Hosted Graphite
  
  
• Dashboards

The key thing to remember is that Hosted Graphite by MetricFire is more than just Graphite. Our Hosted Graphite product actually adds data dimensionality and better data storage.

The benefits of MetricFire are:

• Simple, low-cost pricing
  A structured pricing model based on unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allow you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric.
  
  
  
• Easy-to-use dashboards
  Easily share your dashboards with clients for free.
  
  
  
• Responsive alerting
  Alert notification integrations PagerDuty, Slack, email, and webhooks.
  
  
  
• Freedom of customization
  Custom metrics through your code.
  
  
  
• Fantastic customer support
  Highly available support is provided by engineers for engineers to get you set up quickly.
  
  
  
• Enterprise-ready
  Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment. 
    

MetricFire is a powerful monitoring and analytics platform that allows you to collect, visualize, and analyze data from various sources. When it comes to network infrastructure, integrating MetricFire with MikroTik routers and switches can provide valuable insights into the performance and health of your network devices. This integration enables you to monitor metrics such as traffic, bandwidth, CPU usage, and other important network statistics. In this guide, we will walk you through the steps to integrate MetricFire with MikroTik routers and switches.

Step 1: Set up a MetricFire Account To get started, you'll need to have a MetricFire account. If you don't have one yet, head over to the MetricFire website and sign up for an account. MetricFire offers a variety of plans to suit different needs, including a free trial.

Step 2: Install and Configure Telegraf Telegraf is an open-source data collection agent that MetricFire uses to gather data from various sources. It supports a wide range of input plugins, including the MikroTik plugin, which allows you to collect metrics from MikroTik devices.

Install Telegraf on a machine that has network access to your MikroTik routers and switches. You can find the installation instructions for Telegraf on the InfluxData website (MetricFire's underlying technology).

Once Telegraf is installed, you'll need to configure it to collect metrics from your MikroTik devices. Edit the Telegraf configuration file (telegraf.conf) and add the following input plugin configuration:

graphql[[inputs.mikrotik]]
  ## List of addresses to gather stats about. Specify an ip on router
  ## that can be accessed from the machine running telegraf.
  servers = ["192.168.1.1"]
  ## RouterOS API port, default is 8728
  port = 8728
  ## Timeout for API requests
  timeout = "5s"
  ## Username and password to access the MikroTik API
  username = "admin"
  password = "yourpassword"

Make sure to replace the IP address, port, username, and password with the appropriate values for your MikroTik device.

Step 3: Start Telegraf After configuring Telegraf, start the Telegraf service on your machine. Telegraf will begin collecting metrics from your MikroTik devices according to the configured settings.

Step 4: Configure MetricFire Data Source Next, you'll need to configure MetricFire to connect to your Telegraf instance and collect the metrics it collects. In your MetricFire account, navigate to the Data Sources section and click on "Add Data Source". Choose "Telegraf" as the data source type and provide the necessary details, such as the IP address or hostname of your Telegraf instance.

Step 5: Visualize and Analyze Metrics Once MetricFire is connected to your Telegraf instance, you can start visualizing and analyzing the collected metrics. MetricFire provides a user-friendly dashboard interface where you can create custom dashboards, charts, and graphs to monitor the performance of your MikroTik routers and switches.

You can also set up alerts and notifications based on specific thresholds or conditions to stay informed about any issues or anomalies in your network.

By integrating MetricFire with MikroTik routers and switches, you can gain valuable insights into the performance and health of your network infrastructure. The combination of Telegraf as the data collection agent and MetricFire as the monitoring and analytics platform provides a powerful solution for network monitoring and troubleshooting. Follow the steps outlined in this guide to get started with the integration and unlock the full potential of your MikroTik devices.

To integrate MikroTik Routers and Switches and MetricFire with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate MikroTik Routers and Switches and MetricFire, and get MikroTik Routers and Switches interacting with your MetricFire dashboards in minutes.