[mrtg] Re: Using perhour option

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Quoting Steve Shipway <s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz>:

>> So I attempted to use "perhour" option.  However, after
>> printing couple of pages on the printer, the graphs have
>> strange peaks, showing something like couple of hundred pages
>> printed per hour (which is wrong).  The data is polled from
>> the printer every 5 minutes (with some other data, like
>> network traffic, memory usage and toner levels).
>
> You'll probably want to suppress the daily graph.
>
> This is because a 'perhour' graph is just a 'perminute' graph multiplied by
> 60, which is a persecond graph multiplied by 60.
>
> Since the normal interval is 5mins, a perminute graph will be 'accurate' as
> the per-x is less than the graph interval.
>
> However, for a perhour graph, what should it show over a 5min interval that
> has a count of 10 pages?  This would sort of indicate a per-hour of 120
> pages, so it shows that.  You get weird peaks.  After all, one print in a
> 5-min period *is* 12/hour, over that period.  It just doesnt make sense to
> look at a graph with granularity smaller than your per- interval.

Yes, it makes perfect sense.  And for some things, when speed is  
actually measured it is the correct thing to do.  However, I simply  
wanted to count how many pages were being printed each hour, and than  
plot that data.  So it is not really how fast the pages were being  
printed, it is the amount of pages that were printed during one hour  
interval.  The "daily" graph would than have steps.  Or explaining it  
differently, what I wanted to display is the value of counter as if it  
was a gauge showing how many pages were printed during previous  
finished one hour interval.

At the end I achived this by making separate cron job that runs every  
hour, and telling mrtg that interval is 60 minutes.  I got the graph  
exactly the way I wanted it, showing how many pages were printed in  
each one hour interval.  The only minor thing is that the newest  
column of data in graph is shaded, and that last hour mark is mocked.   
Looks kinda strage, but the plotted data is correct.  And of course I  
need to wait for one hour before I get current data collected and  
displayed.

It gives me more accurate graph, and I don't need to supress the daily graph.

It would be nice if there was an option telling mrtg to agregate  
collected data for some period of time (for examply one hour), and  
than simply store/plot this agregated value.

-- 
See Ya' later, alligator!
http://www.8-P.ca/

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