[rrd-users] rrd support in collectl

[Mark Seger]

A while ago I had mentioned a system monitoring tool I developed a 
number of years ago called collectl - 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/collectl and I just wanted to let people 
on this list know I've added support for rrd, at least sort of.  
Collectl has the ability to generate data in plottable format as 
space-separated fields and so is easily plotted with tools like 
gnuplot.  However, this is not the format rrd likes and so by added 2 
new switches, one to change the time format and the other to change the 
field separator you can now directly genereate data that can be passed 
directly to the 'update' function.

For example, interactively you can do the following and perhaps pipe it 
to a simply tool that calls the rrd update function for each line passed 
to it:

[root at cag-dl380-01 root]# collectl --sep : --utc -P
waiting for 1 second sample...
#UTC:[CPU]User%:[CPU]Nice%:[CPU]Sys%:[CPU]Idle%:[CPU]Wait%:[CPU]Totl%:[CPU]Intrpt/sec:[CPU]Ctx/sec:[CPU]Proc/sec:[CPU]ProcQue:[CPU]ProcRun:[CPU]L-Avg1:[CPU]L-Avg5:[CPU]L-Avg15:[NET]RxPktTot:[NET]TxPktTot:[NET]RxKBTot:[NET]TxKBTot:[NET]RxCmpTot:[NET]RxMltTot:[NET]TxCmpTot:[NET]RxErrsTot:[NET]TxErrsTot:[DSK]ReadTot:[DSK]WriteTot:[DSK]OpsTot:[DSK]ReadKBTot:[DSK]WriteKBTot:[DSK]KbTot:[DSK]ReadMrgTot:[DSK]WriteMrgTot:[DSK]MrgTot
1188918001:2:0:0:98:0:2:139:42:0:95:0:0:0:0:1:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0
1188918002:0:0:1:98:0:2:143:48:0:95:0:0:0:0:30:3:2:1:0:0:0:0:0:0:3:3:0:204:204:0:48:48
1188918003:0:0:0:100:0:0:138:26:0:95:0:0:0:0:5:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0
1188918004:0:0:0:100:0:0:132:39:0:95:0:0:0:0:24:3:2:1:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0

if you don't want the headers you can always suppress them with the -oH 
switch.  Also note you can generate this data continuously as log files 
which will automatically roll over and be retained for a week or 
whatever other number of days you like.  These samples were generated 
every second, but  you can also use any other time interval of your 
choosing.

The samples above are only for cpu, network and disk summary but you can 
also select a number of other types of data and even specific devices 
like cpus, disk, nics, and a couple of others.  There is a more detailed 
description on the collectl's souceforge webpage and in the man pages.

My longer term thought is to add a switch to collectl to allow you to 
point it to an rrd database and have it update it automatically, but I 
thought it might be a good thing to first put it out there the way it is 
to first see if there is any interest and second to get feedback on the 
best way to do this.

Anyhow, I'm posting this here with the hopes of getting feedback from 
real rrdtool users.

-mark