Monitor your Mikrotik router with Prometheus and Grafana

Over the past years I replaced all my networking gear with Mikrotik devices. Nothing compares to Mikrotik in terms of price, features, performance and reliability. I absolutely love WinBox for management, but sometimes I miss some fancy charts and graphs. Luckily, RouterOS comes with a REST-API that can be used to query arbitrary data from the device.

Setup

• Router running RouterOS 7.x.x
• Raspberry Pi 4 with 2 gb RAM

Demo pictures

Installation

Mikrotik Router

At first you need to prepare your router.

Create a group on the device that has API and read-only access:

/user group add name=prometheus policy=api,read,winbox,test

Create a user that is part of the group:

/user add name=prometheus group=prometheus password=TOP_SECRET

Because the library makes a new connection for every API request, your logs are getting cluttered:

system logging set 0 topics=info,!account

Prepare Raspi

Install Python and pip:

sudo apt install python3-dev python3 python3-pip -y

Install Docker + Docker-compose

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker ubuntu
sudo pip3 install docker-compose
sudo systemctl enable docker