[rrd-users] Finding the right collector & frontend

[listuser at bubba.numbnuts.net]

Greetings.  I'm having trouble finding a collector that can do what I'm
looking for.  I'm unfortunately just starting to jump on the RRD
bandwagon, having used MRTG exclusively in the past (hey Tobi!).  I've
thought of a nice project as an intro to RRD but I can't find a collector
or frontend that will generate what I'm looking for.  Let me describe what
I'm wanting to monitor since the collector is pretty self-explanitory.

First off,

http://wwwstats.net.wisc.edu/CampusIO/io_services_bits/io_services_bits_2d.png

...this FlowScan image is a good example of what I'm wanting to produce.  
In fact it's almost exactly what I want to produce, but instead I want to
graph mail system usage rather than flow data.  I'd like to graph the
relationship between the total mail count and the mail I'm rejecting for
whatever reason (spam, AV checks, non-RFC2822 compliant message, etc..).  
This should give me a total of about 2 dozen things to graph including the
total, total minus rejected spam, and total minus rejected infected mail.  
I'd like to graph on the postive and negative Y axis for inbound and
outbound mail respectively.

Extracting integers from our maillog isn't a problem, even as large as it
gets in a week (tip, logtail is your friend).  My collector problem is
finding one that allows me to stuff 2 dozen integers into it and let it
mess with rrdtool.  I suppose I could script the collector but just in
case someone has already released a collector suited for this task, I'd
rather not reinvent the wheel with a hammer.

The frontend is probably the most difficult to come up with for me.  I 
converted a few MRTG targets over to RRD this weekend and am using 
mrtg-rrd.  Of course it won't let me graph more than two variables (my 
reason for trying to learn RRD).  I'll be graphing each DNS blacklist, 
logical groupings of sendmail access list entries, infected email, 
messages with a malformed MessageID, etc; pretty much anything that I'll 
use to reject an email.  In the past I've done this with MRTG, two 
reject sources at a time.  It wasn't much fun to script that and wasn't 
very easy to identify trends on 12 seperate graphs.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a suitable collector and
frontend?  Do most RRD users script their own collector or is there one
that is the general multi-purpose collector that everyone likes to use?  
I've been looking at the various frontends listed on the website.  There
are quite a few more of them since the last time I looked which is good.  
Of course now there are so many, it's hard to try them all out. :)

Thanks
 Justin


--
Unsubscribe mailto:rrd-users-request at list.ee.ethz.ch?subject=unsubscribe
Help        mailto:rrd-users-request at list.ee.ethz.ch?subject=help
Archive     http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/rrd-users
WebAdmin    http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/lsg2.cgi