NAME¶
mrtg-rrd - How to use RRDtool with MRTG
SYNOPSIS¶
After using MRTG for some time you may find some limitations, mostly in the
areas of performance and graphing flexibility. These are exactly the areas
addressed by RRDtool. To learn more about RRDtool check out its website on
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool
When using mrtg with RRDtool you are replacing
rateup with the RRDtool
perl module
RRDs.pm. To enable RRDtool support in mrtg you have to add
the line
LogFormat: rrdtool
to your mrtg config file.
MRTG needs access to both the RRDtool perl module
RRDs.pm and to the
rrdtool executable.
If these two items are not installed in locations where perl can find them on
its own, then you can use the following two parameters to supply the
appropriate directories.
For the location of the
rrdtool executable you put
PathAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/bin/
or
PathAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin
For the location of the perl module it would be:
LibAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/lib/perl/
or
LibAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin\lib\perl
When you have made this modification to the configuration file, several things
will happen when you run mrtg again with the new config file:
- 1.
- mrtg will take all your old ".log" files and
convert them to ".rrd" format. (The ".log"
files don't get touched in the process, so if things don't work out they
are still there.)
- 2.
- mrtg will use rrdtool to update its databases. These
will have a new format called rrd which is totally different than
the native log format of the classic mrtg.
- 3.
- mrtg will not create any webpages of graphs anymore.
It will only query the routers for traffic information and update its
rrd databases.
The advantage of whole thing is that the mrtg will become
much faster.
Expect the runtime to drop to 20% of the previous value. (I would like to get
some feedback on this from folks with large installations.)
Mind you, though, while the logging process of RRDtool is
very fast, you
are also gaining some time by neither creating graphs nor updating webpages.
The idea behind this is that it is more efficient to create graphs and
webpages on demand by using a cgi script.
At the moment there is no
official script to do this, but two
contributers have created such scripts:
- One4All aka 14all.cgi
- This was the first program to take over the webpage
creation and graphing task. It has been developed by Rainer Bawidamann
rainer.bawidamann@web.de. You can find a copy on Rainers website:
http://my14all.sourceforge.net/ The program comes with its own
documentation
- routers2.cgi
- This is another CGI frontend for mrtg running with rrdtool.
The main difference between this and 14all is that the web pages it
creates are much more stylish than the ones from mrtg, plus they support
User Defined summary graphs and different levels of Authentication and
Authorisation. This has been written by Steve Shipway
(steve@steveshipway.org). You obtain a copy, and find a forum and
demonstration system at http://www.steveshipway.org/software/ The program
comes with its own installation instructions and install script.
- mrtg-rrd
- The mrtg-rrd script is a CGI/FastCGI application by Jan
"Yenya" Kasprzak for displaying MRTG graphs from data in the
RRDtool format. It is an intended replacement for the 14all.cgi script. It
can make your monitoring system faster because MRTG does not have to
generate all the PNG files with graphs every 5 minutes or so. Instead of
this the graphs are generated on-demand when the user wants to see them.
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/mrtg-rrd/
FUTURE¶
Just as a side note: MRTG-3 will be based entirely on rrdtool technology. But
don't wait for it ... get going
now!
AUTHOR¶
Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch>