[olug] rrdtool rulez

[Jay Hannah]

Wow. rrdtool is cooler than I thought. I've been messing with it for a 
week and now I have 25 different things I'm monitoring by minute, week, 
year, and biannually (approx.).

I was introduced to RRD via MRTG and Big Brother, but I didn't realize 
how cool and customizable it was for your own arbitrary stuff.

    http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/

Using a Perl library to talk to RRD makes things even quicker to set up:

    http://search.cpan.org/~mschilli/RRDTool-OO-0.11/lib/RRDTool/OO.pm
    (Thanks Mike!!)

I wrote a little (Perl) CGI wrapper around it and now I can RRD, graph, 
and trend any new datapoint I want in about 10 minutes.

I also didn't realize how sweet the RRD built-in graphing stuff is. Mix 
and match (stack, multi-line, whatever) all your different RRD 
datasets. Run calculations, summaries, whatever. Graphs pop out 
instantly in gobs of different styles, formats, etc. Don't like the 
look? Tweak the config and the graph changes -- the data is completely 
stand-alone.

Much quicker than GD::Graph'ing stuff myself!! -grin-

j