[rrd-users] Re: RRD -- front-end ?

[Gerhard Ecaroh Froehlich]

Hi,

"Vicky O. Mair" wrote:
> 
> hi there,
> 
> i am currently reading through faqs, mailing list and anything and
> everything that i can put my hands on as far as rrd goes so please bare
> with me while i try and digest the information.....but in the meanwhile
> just wondering if someone could help answer a simple question.

There is no simple answer to your simple question. You did not define how large
your environment is, nor where it may end. Neither what kind of processes you
want to monitor. A brief description as short list could have make it more clear

> what are people (in general) using as far as the front-end goes for rrdtool
> database. just trying to understand and looking for recommendation.

To short it for all here: My prefered tool after long time of testing is
Remstats. The Reason to use Remstats was it's scalabilty, clear structed code,
written in pure Perl and ease of administration. And it runs without adding
additional software and without to much trouble on the beasty Solaris. :-|
 
> any help will be appreciated.
> 
> cheers,
> /vicky
> 

To those who already have a solution, the rest of this reply maybe to long and
boaring for you - go back to your work! ;-))

I don'nt know how long you'r in thist list. The questions was answered sometimes
before. To sum it up here are some excerpts of previous written mails:

I have searched long time for a usefull tool for migrating from MRTG to RRDTool.
Mainly cause i am no programmer at all. At least i have a few links collected
which i can comment after a period of testing.

Tried almost all. Took a lot of time - whow - and got lots of errors! :-(( . But
to be fair, mostly errors were caused by my cruel environment of Solaris Hosts
and
not of the used software.

An very easy way is to still let mrtg do the collecting and add 'use rrdtool' in
mrtg.cfg. This is described in the MRTG/RRDTool Documentation. As data is now
stored in rrdtool and no html and pictures are generated by mrtg anymore you
need to extract it by an cgi. Usefull in this case:

 - 14all.cgi, <http://www.uni-ulm.de/~rbawidam/mrtg-rrd/>
   Usefull, fast to setup but it doesnot scale well in big environents
 - cgi Scripts <http://www.cheshire.demon.co.uk/pub/>
   Takes automaticaly his setup from your existing mrtg.cfg without to much
   configuration. Scales good up to 20 hosts but i had some difficulties 
   to change defaults. Remember, i am not a programmer ;-(
 - cricket, i didnot test this. My first impression was that it does fit 
   network devices better than host performance. But i can be wrong.

For larger environments there are two solutions which use rrdtool without mrtg.
Not all old archives can be migrated:

 - NRG <http://nrg.hep.wisc.edu>
   Seems to work fine on Linux, my Solaris brought some difficulties
 - Remstats <http://remstats.crc.ca>
   Good for very large environments

Remstats is my favorite tool cause it's pure perl and cgi. It does not need to
much special software, modules or libraries nor does it need binaries. It's
quick to set up in an closed environment where you don't have the permission to
change existing "jumpstarts" at all. Remstats is quiet good if you have a lot of
machines ( > 50 hosts ).

You can also try Big Sister, Big Brother, Orca and so on. But if you only need
graphing as replacement for MRTG with some kind of eventnotification it will be
best. One tricky feature on Remstats is the documentation, which will be created
real time when compiling with your "configure prefixes".

Without some knowledge round compiling, networking, TCP/IP and SNMP it would be
not simple to set it up. RRDTool is no clicking tool but a scalable flexibel
tool for people who have knowledge in scripting. And setup in large environments
( > than 100 hosts) would be a project for months to do. And after all you will
see that you *have* to test a few of them to find to one that fit _your_ needs
really!

So this is my _personal_ opinion. I do not want to say, that all those other
tools are worse but that it depends on your needs and your *knowledge* what you
take. ;-))  If i would be able to programm my own tool surely my decision could
be different. But without reinventing the wheel Open Source makes you able to
customize and extend given code to your needs. And this matches all tools round
RRD World!

Sure there are a lot of other good tools round rrdtool and networkmanagment.
Some need lots of experience, some are quiet easy to install. Try it out. If you
have a Unix System most things would be easier, best is Linux at all cause most
of required modules, scripts, compilers are availabel for Linux. I had to set it
up on Solaris - this one is really hard work sometimes. Maybe someone in the
list will reply with additional information.

Bye, Ecaroh

-- 
Gerhard Ecaroh Froehlich, Systemadministrator

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