Graphing Software that Retains Perfdata

[Thomas Guyot-Sionnest]

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On 24/11/09 06:20 AM, Mark Baxter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  
> 
> We?ve been using Nagiosgraph for some time for graphing, but of late my
> boss has been requesting historical data for presentations and whatnot.
> The problem is that the rrdtool doesn?t appear to keep all the data it
> gets. Maybe it is configured badly, but it appears to only keep limited
> data for the yearly graphs, so when doing a data export we only really
> have decent data for analysis from the past month or so.
> 
>  
> 
> Ideally I think a solution that stores the information in a MySQL
> database would be optimal as the required data could be easily queried
> and exported in a boss-friendly format.
> 
>  
> 
> Does anyone know of such a solution? If not, does anyone know if I have
> simply screwed up the Nagiosgraph install or, if not, if there is any
> way I can change the configuration so as to retain all data written to
> the .rrd files?

I don't know about Nagiosgraph, the the way RRD are designed it to keep
different resolution of data for different intervals, doing automatic
aggregation. These resolutions/interval are defined in RRA's with a
consolidation function (CF) that determine what value is retained (AVG
(average), MAX, MIN...).

Lets say you have a RRD that gets data every minute, and you have 2880
lines in the first RRA, that means it will keep 2 days of 1-minute data
(60*24*2 = 1880). Then the next one might gets 5-minute average (5
primary data point (pdp) per row) and if you have 4032 lines in this
RRA,it will retain 14 days of data, then you might have a 30-minute (6
pdp since it's based on the 5-minute RRA), 2-hours (4 pdp), daily (6
pdp) RRAs and so on. A daily-data RRA of 1460 rows will retain 4 years
of data with 1-day granularity. That looks great with long-term graphs
that covers nearly a full year or more, but if you zoom in it you will
not find it much appealing (i.e. no curves that you'd normally expect on
daily graphs as the load change throughout the day).

Therefore if you're just missing long-term low-resolution data then you
will have add such RRA to keep this data. OTOH if you want high
resolution on long term data you will have to increase the number of
rows on the RRAs you need, based on what you need. Note that the later
option will greatly increase the size of you RRD files, which are
created at full capacity and will never grow.

Also take note that you can't just resize a RRD, you normally have to
export and re-import it, although if it's somewhat compatible you may be
able to export the data from the old RRAs and import it on the new one.
This is a manual process, but there may be some tools available out
there that automate resizing of RRD files.

You will find more information on RRD files and the RRDTool commands at
this page:
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

Hope this helps.

- --
Thomas
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