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

[Alex van den Bogaerdt]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 07:23:44AM -0400, Mark Seger wrote:
> I think this makes a lot of sense and I'm certainly willing to give it a 
> shot and see what the results look like as you can never be completely 
> sure until you try it.  So the next obvious question becomes how much 
> work is it to do something like this in and more important how much 
> overhead will this add?  From what I've already seen with preliminary 
> testing is that rrdgraph is already very fast and so I'm hoping it 
> should be so too.
> 
> Does this involve storing both min and max values?  I just did a quick 
> test and found to store about 80 10 sec samples requires about 20MB for 
> a day's worth of data on 1 system and I normally retain a week since as 
> we all know sometimes system problems go undetected for several days and 
> you need to retain that level of detail.

Best effort basis, from memory and without testing.

Step size one second, you want a week which is 7 days of 86400 seconds
each, so you need to retain 7 * 86400 = 604800 rows in the RRA with
the best resolution.  This RRA can be min,avg,max or last. It doesn't
matter if you don't use consolidation.  Use AVERAGE because then you
know for sure RRDtool will not select the wrong RRA later on if you
happen to give slightly wrong inputs at graph time.

Then you should also have a couple of RRAs at a lower resolution. These
RRAs will contain your MIN and MAX values. You will need to think about
the perfect resolution to look at this data, and set its parameters
accordingly.  Suggestion: 432 pixels and 200 seconds per pixel column
(to display a day at a time) or 1400 seconds per pixel (to look at a
week).  You can use the same RRA to display a week or a day, no problem.

This means:
1 RRA, AVERAGE, 1 step per row, at least 604800 rows
1 RRA, MIN, 200 steps per row, at least 3024 rows
1 RRA, MAX, 200 steps per row, at least 3024 rows

(200*3024=604800; also a full week)

Display script 1, showing the extremes:

rrdtool graph pic1.png --start end-7d -w 432 \
	DEF:min=my.rrd:ds0:MIN \
	DEF:max=my.rrd:ds0:MAX \
	CDEF:dif=max,min,- \
	AREA:min \
	AREA:dif#000000::STACK

Display script 2, showing high resolution data:

rrdtool graph pic2.png --start end-432sec -w 432 \
	DEF:ds0=my.rrd:ds0:AVERAGE \
	LINE1:ds0#000000


Both examples can and probably should be expanded, for instance
setting an end time, using other colors better matching your
capabilities, changing width and/or height, and so on.

Please understand that the 200-seconds-per-row RRA will only show
finished data, meaning it will not show the most recent seconds
(upto 199 seconds).

HTH
-- 
Alex van den Bogaerdt
http://www.vandenbogaerdt.nl/rrdtool/