(This is still a work in progress, please ignore typo's and weird gramatical bits for the moment)

JFFNMS is a php front end to rrdtool graphs. By default it will walk through an snmp device and auto-detect any standard SNMP interfaces it can find, such as CPU information, byte counters per network interface, etc etc.

If you want to make JFFNMS graph other things, such as SNMP information out of a custom MIB, you need to add support into JFFNMS to do this. Once the support is into JFFNMS, it will allow you to monitor that interface on all machines, and if you have Autodiscovery enabled for a host, it may even automatically add the graph with no user intervention.

Unfortunatly the user interface for JFFNMS could do with some work, and the documentation is not much better.

For my application I wanted to monitor a new SNMP based temperature and humidity sensor (http://dcf.sk/microweb/snmpmain.html) we purchased.

This assumes that you have got JFFNMS installed and working correctly, and that you have some understanding of how to write PHP and how SNMP works.

Some JFFNMS terms:

• Interface - The basic unit which you can monitor. An obvious example is a port in a router. An interface may have multiple statistics gathered about it. (Eg. packet loss rates, bytes in, bytes out). However an interface might be something like a disk, or a temperature sensor
• Host - An entity that contains interfaces. You define the IP address to talk to and the community string to use at a host level.
• Interface Type - A type of interface, a host may contain multiple instances of each interface type. (Eg. physical_interface, temperature sensor)
• Poller - A script that when given a paramerter (what to poll) will return a single value. (Eg. There is a single snmp poller which when passed an OID will return it's current value)
• Poller Item - A defination of how to get a specific parameter for an Interface by using a poller (Eg. The "Bytes In" poller item uses the snmp poller and provides it the OID to fetch the bytes in value for a specific interface.)
• Poller Group - A group of poller items which collect and store all the stats relating to an Interface Type.