I am already quite familiar with the (excellent and extremely useful) /tools/graphing situation — I use that practically every day to get a feel for the health of my network interfaces. But I’ve found the 5-minute average display for the “daily” graph isn’t granular enough in some situations I really care about. I then use Webfig to access, for instance, /interfaces//Traffic and look at the pretty SVGs. They’re A-MAZ-ING, and I wish I could see them more easily. My ideal would be to make a “dashboard” of sorts, showing the real-time SVG of a couple different interfaces. Is there any way to finagle that without getting too intense?
Google Search: RouterOS API traffic graph
Top result was PDF with MUM 2017 presentation slides:
Live Bandwidth Monitoring using the Mikrotik API
https://mum.mikrotik.com/presentations/ZA17/presentation_4837_1511767244.pdf
Beyond that further down Google Search results are several bloggers. There’s at least two GitHub projects.
Yay, more pretty graphs are always good. Unfortunately they’re not exactly what I’m after. 
Still I think that’s a fine place to start looking at more “intense” solutions. Thanks!
You’re welcome. As time permits, consider posting what your learn here as your adventure proceeds.
You might want to take a look at this thread regarding using Splunk for this purpose:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/tool-using-splunk-to-analyse-mikrotik-logs-4-0-graphing-everything/153043/1
viewtopic.php?t=179960
Splunk is already on my radar for its traditional use of centralized logging. It’s hard to imagine that Mikrotik’s output of network activity to Syslog would be both granular enough for what I’m seeking (the SVGs look to be about a 1Hz update frequency) and keep me below the 500MB freebie limit even for my tiny network. While I’d actually have no objection to paying, it’s something I’d prefer to avoid especially taking into account the additional upstream bandwidth I’d end up using. And like I said, I just don’t see it working for what I need. But I’m putting a pin in that idea for later … it may hold some promise for other plans.
On the “continuing adventure” I am currently looking at remote packet capture (Wireshark et al) that may help me out even more for the future because of course once I start looking at spikes in a pretty graph my next breath will be speaking “What’s causing all that?” So learning this now will be a bit like replacing an engine’s water pump while it’s torn down to switch the timing belt. But the recent upgrade (from 7.11 to 7.11.2) broke a couple scripts, and a pi-hole container, so I’ve been scrambling to recover from that rather than moving forward. Such is the way, and I suppose I’m better for it because I’m undoing some of my mistakes.
Anyway, thanks again!