Note to self: RRDtool
We use gnuplot at work to make our custom one-off pretty graphs that monitor traffic:
It’s kind of pain to use, I think largely because of it’s history as an X11/postscript graphing tool. If you just want a PNG, it’s not really the sweet spot. Gnuplot seems better suited to plotting equations than it does to reams of traffic data.
I noticed our Google mini uses rrdtool; it looked a lot like gnuplot, so I’m looking into it further to see if it’s easier to do little consoles like ours.
Update: needs freetype2 and libpng:
yum install libpng-devel
yum install freetype-devel
November 17th, 2008 at 5:17 am
So how is the progress?
I found this note when googling with words “gnuplot” “rrdtool”.
And all I want to say is: Rrdtool is more like a pioneer’s (aka newbie’s) project.
For example: rrdcgi tool (intended to process html-templates) randomly segfaults without any reasons leaving no notices.
Actually I was searching for a rrdgraph-scenario to gnuplot-scenario converter and still being unsuccesful.
rrdtool is best at collecting, preprocessing and storing data values, but it’s graphing capabilities,
being so cool-looking, still are too poor, when compared to real graphing software.
Still, I do not understand why Tobias (rrdtool author) had to reinvent it’s own grapher instead of making
good templates (or even better - template generator) for software like gnuplot or any other.
It smells like a pioneer’s approach…
November 17th, 2008 at 7:24 am
We now use RRDtool for nearly all of our time-series performance plotting. It’s so much easier to use and better than gnuplot at this particular problem. It’s also much faster at cunching through the data, which makes a difference when you need to generate thousands of graphs every night (we do).
RRDtool is extremely popular, and we don’t have any problems with it crashing… once it is installed. I must say, it can be quite difficult to get compiled and running properly on different operating systems. It seems like every time I try it on a new Linux distribution there is a whole new host of issues to deal with, more so than most mature open source projects.
We’re willing to put up with these problems because we haven’t found anything better at this particular problem.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:36 am
But what is on the screenshot (http://egopoly.com/screenshot_37.jpg)? Is it rrdtool ?
PS: It feels like rrdtool itself does not segfaults, but rrdcgi does. I will have to stop using rrdcgi.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:07 am
no, that’s GNUplot.