Monitor your Mikrotik router with Prometheus and Grafana

Over the past years I replaced all my networking gear with Mikrotik devices. 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. After some research I found some useful tools and blog posts that solved similar problems. Namely:

• A blog post by Devin Smith that first got me interested
• A somewhat useable Grafana Dashboard
• A Prometheus exporter for Mikrotik devices written in Python.
• A Prometheus exporter for Mikrotik devices written in Go

Setup

• Router running RouterOS 7.x.x
• Raspberry Pi 4 with 2 gb RAM (other PIs may also work, but I wanted ARM 64 bit)
• before opening a new issue, please take a look at the FAQ

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

Prepare Raspi

You need Ubuntu Server for ARM 64 bit in order to use this setup. You may also use Raspian, but then you are limited to 32bit ARM executables. This would mean, that you need to compile the mikrotik-exporter by hand, because there are no pre built 32-bit Docker images.

You need to execute the following steps on the target machine itself (e.g. Raspberry Pi).

Install Python and pip:

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

Install Docker + Docker-compose (reboot required)

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

Optional: Build the Docker Image for mktxp

It might be necessary to build the Docker Image for: https://github.com/akpw/mktxp. This is especially the case, if your architecture is not:

• linux/amd64
• linux/arm/v7
• linux/arm64

# Get the mktxp repository
git clone https://github.com/akpw/mktxp.git

# Go into the newly downloaded repo
cd mktxp

# Build the docker image
docker build . -t leonmorten/mktxp:latest

Now get this repo and install all services:

# Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/M0r13n/mikrotik_monitoring.git


# Go into the cloned directory
cd mikrotik_monitoring

# Let docker-compose do it's job
docker-compose up -d

You may need to adjust the following configuration files and add your own credentials for your router:

• mktxp/mktxp.conf

Done. You should now be able to open the Grafana dashboard on Port 3000 of your Raspberry Pi.

Multiple Nodes

It is possible to monitor multiple (Mikrotik) devices. Just change add as many devices to mktxp/mktxp.conf as you want.

HTTPS

It is also possible to access the Grafana Dashboard over HTTPS. Depending on your security requirements and/or threat model it might be a good idea to enable HTTPS.

Generate a self signed certificate for your domain:

sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout ./nginx/nginx-selfsigned.key -out ./nginx/nginx-selfsigned.crt

Replace the content of ./nginx/nginx.conf with:

server {
  listen 80;
	listen [::]:80;
	server_name _;
	return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  listen [::]:443 ssl;
  include ssl/self-signed.conf;

  location / {
   proxy_set_header Host $http_host; 
   proxy_pass http://grafana:3000/;
  }
}

FAQ

Why are my graphs empty?

It might happen that the Grafana dashboard loads, but the graphs remain empty. If the dashboard loads, but no data is shown, this may be caused by any of the following reasons:

• invalid credentials for the monitored RouterOS device
  • verify with: /user/print detail
• invalid host and port for the monitored RouterOS device
  • check that the IP or host name of the monitored device is correct
• API service disabled on the RouterOS device
  • verify with /ip/service/print detail

What distinguishes this project from other similar projects?

This project is only a personal hobby. It do it mainly to learn something and to improve my skills. Therefore, the project does not compete with other projects. Nor do I aim for completeness or perfection. The goal of this project is to develop a monitoring solution for multiple RouterOS devices simultaneously that is resource-efficient and scalable.

Why you don't use the SNMP for monitoring?

Firstly SNMP based monitoring is painfully slow. In my experience SNMP walks are slow and CPU heavy. And I am not alone with this. In my experience the API is much faster and produces less stress on the CPU of the monitored device.

Secondly I never really got used to the way that SNMP metrics and queries are structured. I find them very hard to read.

In addition, the API offers a lot of flexibility. Any command can be executed on RouterOS via the API. Thus it is possible to collect complex metrics.