=head1 NAME

mrtg-rrd - How to use RRDtool with MRTG

=head1 SYNOPSIS

After using MRTG for some time you may find some limitations, mostly in the
areas of performance and graphing flexibility. These are exactly the areas
addressed by RRDtool. To learn more about RRDtool check out its website on

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

=head1 RRDTOOL INTEGRATION

When using mrtg with RRDtool you are replacing F<rateup> with the
RRDtool perl module F<RRDs.pm>. To enable RRDtool support in mrtg
you have to add the line

 LogFormat: rrdtool

MRTG needs access to both the RRDtool perl module B<RRDs.pm> and to the
B<rrdtool> executable.

If these two items are not installed in locations where perl can find them
on its own, then you can use the following two parameters to supply the
appropriate directories.

For the location of the B<rrdtool> executable you put

 PathAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/bin/

or

 PathAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin

For the location of the perl module it would be:

 LibAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/lib/perl/

or

 LibAdd: c:\rrdtool\bin\lib\perl

When you have made this modification to the configuration file, several
things will happen when you run mrtg again with the new config file:

=over

=item 1.

mrtg will take all your old C<.log> files and B<convert> them to C<.rrd>
format. (The C<.log> files don't get touched in the process, so if things
don't work out they are still there.)

=item 2.

mrtg will use B<rrdtool> to update its databases. These will have a new format
called I<rrd> which is totally different than the native I<log> format of
the classic mrtg.

=item 3.

mrtg will B<not> create any webpages of graphs anymore.
It will only query the routers for traffic information and update its I<rrd>
databases.

=back 

The advantage of whole thing is that the mrtg will become B<much>
faster. Expect the runtime to drop to 20% of the previous value. (I would like
to get some feedback on this from folks with large installations.)

Mind you, though, while the logging process of RRDtool is B<very> fast, you
are also gaining some time by neither creating graphs nor updating webpages.
The idea behind this is that it is more efficient to create
graphs and webpages on demand by using a cgi script.

At the moment there is no B<official> script to do this, but two
contributers have created such scripts:

=over

=item B<14all.cgi>

This was the first program to take over the webpage creation and graphing task.
It has been developed by S<Rainer Bawidamann
E<lt>rainer.bawidamann@web.deE<gt>>. You can find a copy 
on Rainers website:

 http://my14all.sourceforge.net/

The program comes with its own documentation

=item B<routers.cgi>, B<servers.cgi> and B<generic.cgi>

These are other cgi frontends to mrtg running with rrdtool. The main difference
between this and 14all is that the web pages it creates are much more stylish than the
ones from mrtg. These tools have been written by S<Steve Shipway
E<lt>steve@steveshipway.orgE<gt>>. You can find a copy in

 http://www.steveshipway.org/software/

The scripts comes with their own installation instructions.

=item B<mrtg-rrd>

The mrtg-rrd script is a CGI/FastCGI application by Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak for
displaying MRTG graphs from data in the RRDtool format. It is an intended
replacement for the 14all.cgi script. It can make your monitoring system
faster because MRTG does not have to generate all the PNG files with graphs
every 5 minutes or so. Instead of this the graphs are generated on-demand
when the user wants to see them.

   http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/mrtg-rrd/

=back

Paul C. Williamson has written a more in-depth page on how the whole process works, including some performance figures. You can find his page on

   http://www.geocities.com/paulcwilliamson/mrtg/rateup2rrd.html


=head1 FUTURE

Just as a side note: MRTG-3 will be based entirely on rrdtool technology.
But don't wait for it ... get going B<now>!

=head1 AUTHOR

Tobias Oetiker E<lt>oetiker@ee.ethz.chE<gt>
