[rrd-users] Re: Frontend for RRDTool, What's your opinion?

[Clifton Royston]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 10:17:36AM -0800, Jason Fesler wrote:
> 
> > Of course, there is a need having a scalable frontend and data
> > collector (SNMP/custom scripts) without reeventing the wheel. And
> > also code which will be a startingpoint with clear and functionable
> > code on which i can rely and use to
... 

Of course, if you're starting with MRTG one alternative is to continue
using MRTG but with RRDtool as the backend.

If you've decided you want to switch off of MRTG, there's 14all,
Cricket, Bronc, and all the others listed at
<http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/rrdworld/index.html>

I went with Cricket because it seemed to be intended to address some of
the things we had found to be problems with MRTG - always building all
graphs even if they'll never be looked, hard to keep on top of updating
the configuration as new devices get added, SNMP strings stored
zillions of places, etc.  For most routine router updates at this site,
we just run a script which polls the routers for any configuration
changes and updates their configuration accordingly.  Certain other
kinds of updates are also very easily to do globally; e.g. we can
update the SNMP community string for every switch on our network by
changing one line in the right place in the Cricket config.  Cricket's
certainly not perfect but it does OK for us.  Some things were harder
to move out of MRTG, and we just left those under MRTG for monitoring.


> Ultimatley I wrote my own that was better suited to my environment than the
> other front ends were.  RRD's biggest expense is IO, not CPU, at least when
> it comes to data storage.  Graphing is CPU intensive, but we solved that by
> only showing graphs when needed, and making the display system flexible (I
> have a single iamge showing thing that takes all of its info by URL, and
> people just make web pages refering to the url to pull the data they want
> displayed..).

This part sounds a bit like reinventing Cricket. :-)  Same single CGI
to create all web pages by URL, same feature to pull graphs only on
demand.

> I currently update 8700 files once a minute; each file has on average 10 DS's.
> I'm doing this on an e450 with 2x 8 drive raid5 configurations.  I probably
> should have striped things for IO speed - I use every bit of IO I have but
> hardly touch the space.  On average I'm in about 60 %busy on IO, which is
> definately taking its toll on the machine interactiveness. That machine runs
> a load of about 1.2 if nobody is looking at graphs.  This is on sparc CPU's
> - the e450 has 4x400 mhz to play with, so system loads to aroudn 4 don't
> really bother me.

Sounds pretty good to me, though I don't know how to directly compare
the performance of an e450 with an Intel box.  Sounds like you're
logging a lot more data than we are though.

  -- Clifton

-- 
 Clifton Royston  --  LavaNet Systems Architect --  cliftonr at lava.net
   WWJD?   "JWRTFM!" - Scott Dorsey (kludge)   "JWG" - Eddie Aikau

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