[rrd-users] Re: Best RRDTool frontend

[Chris Snell]

At 11:11 AM 3/6/00, Gildas PERROT wrote:

>I am using MRTG for plotting graphs from SNMP requests. I would like to
>migrate to a system based on RRDTool and I see there is several ones : mrtg
>again, cricket, bronc, NRG, remstats and orca.
>
>What is the best or perhaps better question : what are the advantages and
>drawbacks of each of them ?

Hi,

We use Bronc here at bikeworld.com to monitor our DSL lines, bandwidth 
usage for our colocated servers, and printer page counts. I wrote Bronc so 
it was pretty easy to set up, though I'm pretty biased. :-) Really 
though... Here are some advantages and disadvantages to using bronc:

Advantages.
- it's very fast and uses minimal system resources. graphs are generated 
on-the-fly, only as you need them. The page generation engine is based on 
Mason (http://masonhq.com) and mod_perl for speed and extensibility.
- if you like Perl, there's really no limit when it comes to adding custom 
features. The in-line nature of Mason lets you embed Perl into the HTML 
which is nice.
- badger.pl, the SNMP collector, is quite robust.

Disadvantages.
- The configuration file can be a little daunting if you're not moderately 
skilled with Perl. It's basically one huge Perl data structure.
- There is currently no easy and efficient way to set the WIDTH and HEIGHT 
values in the <IMG> tag in Bronc's HTML templates. This is because the 
template does not know anything about the final size of the image--That's 
up to Grapher.pm and RRDtool to decide.
- There is currently no support for gathering values from STDOUT. This 
would be trivial (~5 lines of code) to implement in badger.pl but I just 
haven't had the time since starting my new job here.
- The documentation sucks.

Hope this helps!

good luck,

Chris

--
Chris Snell <chris at bikeworld.com>               210.828.5558 W
Systems & Networks                              210.602.2308 M
Bike World of San Antonio                       210.832.8331 H
http://bikeworld.com | http://weathertools.com | http://gpstools.com

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