[kwlug disc.] Monitoring throughput

[Paul Nijjar]

It's me again, with another dumb question. 

I have some wireless routers (D-Link DWL-2100AP, if it's important). 
The web interface for these devices has a stats section
that has numbers like this:

Throughput
----------
Transmit Success Rate 100  %
Transmit Retry Rate: 4  %
Receive Success Rate: 97  %
Receive Duplicate Rate: 0  %

These numbers look promising. I want to monitor things like this in
Linux. Overall, I am trying to figure out why our wireless link
is intermittently slow (which causes me embarrassment during LUG
meetings, as demonstrated this month). I am not sure exactly what
numbers I am supposed to be measuring, but transmit and receive
success rates look like a start. 

Things I would like: 
  - Make graphs of this data
  - Maybe send notifications if receive/transmit rates get really low

These devices are SNMP enabled, and I am learning how to access their
counters. But I am not sure what to do next -- so far I don't see
obvious counters that correspond to what the web interface displays.
I am not even sure what tools I am looking for. Nagios? Cacti? MRTG?
Something else? 

I am hoping that you smart people have some pointers as to how people
monitor these things. 

- Paul



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