“You have become the network administrator of the company where
you work . You sit relaxed in your chair, when the boss enters the
room. He begins to cry that he doesn’t understand the thousand-word
e-mails he receives daily concerning IP traffic statistics. He
would rather see wonderful graphical statistics, which exactly
reveal the same as your mail, but in a more appropriate way (for
your boss).”
“Now you have either the choice of writing everything from
scratch yourself or you choose an already existing tool. A very
good choice would be RRDtool (RRD stands for round robin database).
Many of you do know MRTG, the multi router traffic grapher, a tool,
which reads the amount of traffic that occurred on an interface of
a router, writes this data into a file and creates an image of
it,showing the data flow in this interface for a certain
timespan.”
“RRDtool, also written by Tobias Oetiker as MRTG was, is
basically a new implementation of the logging and graphing features
of MRTG. RRDtool itself is not capable of collecting any data.
RRDtool can save data in time-series. That means you define a RRD
database and feed it afterwards with time-value pairs.”