[mrtg-developers] MRTG RRD data retreival

[Israel Brewster]

I have what I hope will be a simple question. Forgive me if it is too  
simple, but this is my first time working with MRTG beyond a basic  
monitoring setup.

the short version:
I am attempting to write a shell script that will retrieve the latest  
values from a MRTG rrd file, which, as I understand it, should be the  
average traffic in/out of a given port over the interval specified in  
the mrtg config. The question I have, in a nutshell, is what is the  
easiest way to pull these values from the rrd file mrtg creates? I  
know I need to use a rrdtool fetch command on the file, and then  
parse the results, but I am having a little trouble figuring out what  
rrdtool command exactly to use and how to parse the results.

The long version:
What I currently have in my script is the following two lines (thanks  
to someone on another mailing list):

VALUEIN="$($RRDTOOL/rrdtool fetch $RRDFILES/$FILE AVERAGE -s-5minutes  
| awk 'BEGIN { IFS=":" } NR==3 { printf("%d\n", $2 * 8) }')"
VALUEOUT="$($RRDTOOL/rrdtool fetch $RRDFILES/$FILE AVERAGE - 
s-5minutes | awk 'BEGIN { IFS=":" } NR==3 { printf("%d\n", $3 * 8) }')"

The problem, though, is that the numbers these return don't appear to  
match up with the numbers that routers2.cgi shows for cur In and Cur  
Out. Sometimes they seem similar, other times they appear way off. I  
have a number of hypotheses for why this might be, but I don't know  
which (if any) are correct:

1) Looking at that command line, it looks like rrdtool is fetching  
the average values for the last 5 minutes. I have no clue what  
specifically the awk portion of the command is doing, other than the  
obvious of parsing out a number. As I have the MRTG interval set to 1  
minute, perhaps this is throwing things off? If so, I would need to  
modify the command so it doesn't mater what the MRTG interval is set  
to, it just gets the latest values. How would I do this? Looking at  
the rrdtool man page, it would seem the command I want would be  
rrdtool fetch <path/to/rrd/file> LAST, but trying this command on the  
command line gives an "ERROR: the RRD does not contain an RRA  
matching the chosen CF" error

2) The awk command isn't correctly parsing the results. As I have  
never worked with awk before, and only have a vague idea what it is  
doing in this case (as I said, these lines of code were given to me),  
I have no idea on this one.

3) routers2 is returning the wrong results. Yeah. Right. Not likely.

4) Both results are correct, 51023 bps=15.31 k, and I'm just  
completely insane. Ok, so you probably have me on the insanity part  
regardless, but...

So, how can I make this work as expected? I am running MRTG 2.12.2 on  
OpenBSD 4.0 with rrdtool 1.0.49 -yes, I know those versions are  
somewhat old, but that is was came in the ports for OpenBSD. Thanks  
for any assistance you can provide.

-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Computer Support Technician
Frontier Flying Service INC.
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
-----------------------------------------------


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