[rrd-users] MAX not behaving as I would expect

[Rob Conway]

Thanks karl,

I forgot I changed the step to 600 from the default of 300.

I did think that maybe the rrdtool create "start time" may in fact set the
start for the 24hr max computation ?

As I run a dedicated unbuntu web server I suppose I could change the time
zone to UTC and just manually set the date/time.  Can someone confirm this
will fix the MAX daily offset problem. ?  How do other people handle this ?

Cheers

Rob australia



-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Fischer [mailto:rrd-users at ficos.de] 
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 8:43 PM
To: Rob Conway
Subject: Re: [rrd-users] MAX not behaving as I would expect

Rob Conway wrote:

> I measure the power used and trend kwh.  At midnight, my read script
> resets and just feeds into rrrd an ever increasing number (accumulated
> kwh) throughout the day so as to produce a saw tooth pattern.  Works
> great, however when I trend the MAX, I 'assumed' I would see the maximum
> value for the 24 hr period.
> 
> I think this was the script I used to create the rrd
> 
> rrdtool create /var/rrd/kw.rrd --start 1167177600 --step 600
> DS:P1:GAUGE:1300:0:100 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:1440 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:4:2160
> RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:12:8760 RRA:MIN:0.5:288:1825 RRA:MAX:0.5:288:1825
>
> The trend can be viewed at www.rjconway.homeip.net
> <http://www.rjconway.homeip.net/>  select [Power] radio button for kwh
> and redraw, you will see the saw tooth, now select [max] .  It seems to
> be giving one max value per two days value changing at midday not
> midnight.

Rob,

if you created the rrd that way, you *asked* to have only one MAX (and MIN)
value per 288 * 600 s (=172800s =48h =2 days)

Regarding the change not beeing at midnight (as expected) I've seen the
same behavior in many cases and I assume this is because rrdtool works
with whole-numbered divisors on the unix timestamp which is UTC based.
You are halfway round the globe, so roughly 10-12h off UTC/GMT ...
A 24h period in rrdtool always seems to be GMT 0:00 to next day GMT 0:00

rrdtool-specialists: please correct me if I'm wrong.

BTW: I also thought about 'correcting' this for my timezone, but even if
I would, it fails at the transition summer<>winter time, since in spring
there's a 23h day and in autumn it's 25h ...

So if you want the numbers from midnight to midnight your time, you'll have
to define your RRA on an hourly basis and do some smart rpn-calculations
when graphing ...

- Karl
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