1MRTG-RRD(1) mrtg MRTG-RRD(1)
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6 mrtg-rrd - How to use RRDtool with MRTG
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9 After using MRTG for some time you may find some limitations, mostly in
10 the areas of performance and graphing flexibility. These are exactly
11 the areas addressed by RRDtool. To learn more about RRDtool check out
12 its website on
13 http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool
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17 When using mrtg with RRDtool you are replacing rateup with the RRDtool
18 perl module RRDs.pm. To enable RRDtool support in mrtg you have to add
19 the line
20 LogFormat: rrdtool
22 to your mrtg config file.
24 MRTG needs access to both the RRDtool perl module RRDs.pm and to the
26 rrdtool executable.
27 If these two items are not installed in locations where perl can find
29 them on its own, then you can use the following two parameters to
30 supply the appropriate directories.
31 For the location of the rrdtool executable you put
33 PathAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/bin/
35 or
37 PathAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin
39 For the location of the perl module it would be:
41 LibAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/lib/perl/
43 or
45 LibAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin\lib\perl
47 When you have made this modification to the configuration file, several
49 things will happen when you run mrtg again with the new config file:
50 1. mrtg will take all your old ".log" files and convert them to ".rrd"
52 format. (The ".log" files don't get touched in the process, so if
53 things don't work out they are still there.)
54 2. mrtg will use rrdtool to update its databases. These will have a
56 new format called rrd which is totally different than the native
57 log format of the classic mrtg.
58 3. mrtg will not create any webpages of graphs anymore. It will only
60 query the routers for traffic information and update its rrd
61 databases.
62 The advantage of whole thing is that the mrtg will become much faster.
64 Expect the runtime to drop to 20% of the previous value. (I would like
65 to get some feedback on this from folks with large installations.)
66 Mind you, though, while the logging process of RRDtool is very fast,
68 you are also gaining some time by neither creating graphs nor updating
69 webpages. The idea behind this is that it is more efficient to create
70 graphs and webpages on demand by using a cgi script.
71 At the moment there is no official script to do this, but two
73 contributors have created such scripts:
74 One4All aka 14all.cgi
76 This was the first program to take over the webpage creation and
77 graphing task. It has been developed by Rainer Bawidamann
78 rainer.bawidamann@web.de. You can find a copy on Rainers website:
79 http://my14all.sourceforge.net/ The program comes with its own
80 documentation
81 routers2.cgi
83 This is another CGI frontend for mrtg running with rrdtool. The
84 main difference between this and 14all is that the web pages it
85 creates are much more stylish than the ones from mrtg, plus they
86 support User Defined summary graphs and different levels of
87 Authentication and Authorisation. This has been written by Steve
88 Shipway (steve@steveshipway.org). You obtain a copy, and find a
89 forum and demonstration system at
90 http://www.steveshipway.org/software/ The program comes with its
91 own installation instructions and install script.
92 mrtg-rrd
94 The mrtg-rrd script is a CGI/FastCGI application by Jan "Yenya"
95 Kasprzak for displaying MRTG graphs from data in the RRDtool
96 format. It is an intended replacement for the 14all.cgi script. It
97 can make your monitoring system faster because MRTG does not have
98 to generate all the PNG files with graphs every 5 minutes or so.
99 Instead of this the graphs are generated on-demand when the user
100 wants to see them. http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/mrtg-rrd/
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103 Just as a side note: MRTG-3 will be based entirely on rrdtool
104 technology. But don't wait for it ... get going now!
105
107 Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch>
1082.17.10 2022-01-19 MRTG-RRD(1)