[mrtg] MRTG with rrdtool vs cricket?

[Lawrence Hays]

Hi all:

Curious if anybody has experince with both mrtg (using rrdtool) and
cricket (http://www.munitions.com/~jra/cricket/)

We're running MRTG V2.8 (I think) without rrdtool but using the mrtg-ip
contributed modifications.  We're very happy, but have reached the point

where scaling without rrdtool will be problematic.  It appears that MRTG

now can use rrdtool and I'm also aware of cricket, which was designed
around rrdtool.  Any feed back on pros and cons of each?  Here are my
thoughts and concerns:

Rrdtool:
both use rrdtool, so it would seem both would scale without beating the
I/O subsystem to death.  How smooth is the integration of rrdtool into
mrtg (last time I looked it appeared to be an option under development
rather than the default back end, is this accurate?)  Do either have an
import tool for old mrtg log files?

Configuration:
I admit I'm curious about the config-tree concept used in cricket, but
then I always have liked mrtg's simplicity.  Any comments here?  One
feature about cricket that seemed interesting was the way it finds the
right interface instance by re-walking the tree based on (as I recall)
interface IP address.  Comments on that? (there's one router we have
that
insists on changing interface descriptions multiple times a day, and it
looks like cricket would handle this transparently - comments?)

Graph generation:
I like the fact that cricket defers the graph generation until the page
is
loaded (I have lots of stats that are rarely viewed). Given that rrdtool

makes mrtg more efficient, does this matter in practice?  Can mrtg still

dissasociate data gathering and graph generation? (the last time I
looked
it was doable as an optional contribution, but wasn't integrated to the
point that it was just a config file option or whatever)

Ongoing development:
Looks like cricket's last release was this past August, MRTG  seems to
change every day.  It seems that mrtg probably has more active
developers.
This is good (lots of improvements) and bad (lots of changes).
Comments?
Which is easier/more fun to hack?

Thanks in advance,

Larry

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