[rrd-users] trying to understand the relationship between source data, what's in rrd and what gets plotted

[Mark Seger]

thanks for the detailed reply and the good news is it more or less 
agrees with how I thought this works.  in fact, I did find a bug in my 
table loading script which caused the table to get created with an 
interval of 3 seconds vs 1 and so yes, things got normalized in 
unexpected way.  once I got my step to 1 second which corresponds to my 
data samples everything did load into the table as expected.  now keep 
in mind I have multiple data samples > 50K.

when I plot the data I only see max data points of 27K.  I tried 
starting the plot 10 seconds later and finishing 10 seconds earlier to 
make sure I'm within the range of the data file and I still don't see 
those points, so I tried just plotting the first 100 elements and lo and 
behold I can now see the points of interest.  Now I can understand the 
beginning or ending data points possibly getting modified if the 
plotting range is outside the data points, by why would internal values 
get modified?  remember, my samples are 1 second apart and I have a step 
of 1 second.

I'm still not sure I fully appreciate the xff in the create but I'm also 
guessing since I don't have any missing data it shouldn't make a 
difference, should it?

Any ideas about what I'm doing wrong?  I'm sure it's me... 8-(

-mark


Simon Hobson wrote:
> Mark Seger wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm sure it's me and not rrdtool, but I can't figure out what's
>> happening!  Here's what did:
>> - I have a data that has been generated at 1 second intervals
>> - generated a plot with gnuplot as a known quantity
>> - loaded the same data into rrdtool as absolute values and also with an
>> interval of 1 sec
>> - did a fetch of all the data
>> - converted it to something I could load into excel and compare with the
>> original values to make sure correct.  they do NOT agree but are close. 
>> perhaps I a still to new to rrdtool to appreciate how my data can get
>> adjusted, but I also would have thought using absolute and 1 second
>> samples there wouldn't be anything to adjust.
>>     
>
> Wrong.
>
>   
>>   that's question 1.  is
>> there a way to make it not do that?  I want to plot the values I've
>> recorded and not some manipulated value.  that's question 2.
>>     
>
> Yes, if you follow some basic rules.
>
> RRDs only store rates, not values - so even though you update with 
> absolute values, this is converted internally into rates.
>
> You will get out what you put in (subject to internal rounding errors 
> etc) only if you meet all these conditions :
>
> 1) You input an update with a timestamp which is exactly aligned with 
> a multiple of step. Eg, if you use a step of 10s, then every update 
> must be an exact multiple of 10s.
>
> 2) You have an RRA within the RRD which is ONE step/consolidated value.
>
> These two between them will eliminate normalisation (1) and aggregation (2).
>
> If you ignore 1 then your input data will be normalised, if you 
> ignore 2 then your data will be consolidated.
>
>
> 3) When plotting/extracting data, you must select start and end times 
> which are also an exact multiple of your step AND the end time must 
> not be after the last full step time AND the start time must not be 
> before the length of your one step/consolidation RRA AND the number 
> of pixels in the graph (or data points extracted) should match the 
> number of samples between start and end.
>
> This will eliminate normalisation of the extracted data or the use of 
> a lower resolution RRA.
>
> Note that you can only extract data from RRAs (ie data that has 
> nominally been consolidated), but it's convenient that if you perform 
> consolidation with one value then you don't change it !
>
> Alex has more on normalisation at his site 
> http://www.vandenbogaerdt.nl/rrdtool/
>
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