MRTG colours

After hard work with my custom MRTG collectors, its time to make some fun with MRTG: COLOURS :-)

To make the charts more funny, we need to know what options we have to add to mrtg.cfg, and what to put as arguments.

Options

There is an option for definition of colour of lines, another for background of web page holding the charts and one nice option to input some custom string at the top border of chart (title and date/time):

Options[bbc.response]: ..., ..., ..., pngdate
PNGTitle[bbc.response]: Response time of http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Colours[bbc.response]: DIRTY YELLOW#E6B420,ORANGE#E65120,THIRD#993615,FOURTH#997815
Background[bbc.response]: #1A1A1A

Here are four colours: a pair for collected data and a pair for additional lines. The names are user defined and we use them later in description at the bottom of the page.

Colour blending

Coding was easy, now WHAT colours to use? Very helpful are sites with application to blend colours. I prefer these: Color Scheme2, Color Blender or Color Schemer


The first offers contrast colour set, especially useful for MRTG.

Bottom of the chart page

At the bottom of auto generated web page are descriptions of colours. By default the names there are: GREEN, BLUE, DARK GREEN, VIOLET. If you change your colour codes in Colours[title], it would be nice to make according changes in the colour names at the footer description. In the examples above colours are: DIRTY YELLOW, ORANGE, THIRD and FOURTH.

Additionally you can make custom description at the bottom of page, which differ from image, because there is more space for explanation:

Legend1[bbc.response]: Average time of retrieving 3 news stories
Legend2[bbc.response]: Max time from 3 retrievings