rrdtool

…and promise_summary.log met Solarized

/ bronto / Leave a comment

Inspired by the blog post at nanard.org, I’ve spent a few days hacking on promise_summary.log and rrdtool, and I have finally something to show.

Let’s recap quickly: a file promise_summary.log in cfengine’s workdir (usually /var/cfengine) contains a summary of every agent run: when the run started and finished, which version of the policy has run, and how many promises (in percentage) were kept, repaired, and not repaired. The first thing I wanted were graphs for these metrics; a medium-term goal is to bring these metrics into some well known tool like Munin or Cacti — that will come later.

I chose to use RRDtool for many reasons; among all:

  • it takes care for both saving the data and making the graphs;
  • it saves the data at different resolutions, automatically;
  • all aspects of a graph are customizable, and different type of graphs can be embedded in the same picture

I had previous experience with RRDtool, and I knew the downsides of course, mainly: the odd, cryptic syntax. What I had forgotten since such a long time was that it’s actually easier than it looks 🙂 … Continue reading →

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Using rrdgraph for better NTP monitoring

/ bronto / 2 Comments

Munin is a great tool, and it seems quite easy to monitor how your NTP service is going overall. E.g.: it's easy to put a web page together with all the offset graphs for your servers.

Unfortunately, this is far from optimal. In fact, the graphs will have different scales on the y axis, so a glance is not enough to check how they are doing overall. You'll actually need to check which values are displayed at the left side of the graph. This is annoying, because if you don't pain enough attention, you could miss bad things happening.

That's why I threw a reluctant eye to rrdtool's graph stuff. I've always been scared by the apparent complexity of the syntax, but I found out that what I needed was easy indeed. … Continue reading →

Quickly graphing RRD data

/ bronto / Leave a comment

Still fiddling with RRD, and I'm about at the end of the tunnel 🙂 I finally collected a significant amount of data, and I have scripts to aggregate different sources. What I was missing was a quick way to generate graphs, so that I could visually check if my aggregated data "looks" OK.

As usual, the syntax of rrdtool graph is quite verbose and cryptic, not exactly what you hope when all you need is a quick one-shot graph of some RRD files.

As always, Perl comes to the rescue, this time with RRD::Simple. RRD::Simple is by default able to generate nice graphs with pre-loaded color schemes –if you suck at choosing colors like me, this is a really appreciable feature. It has a set of pre-defined graphs that it can generate, as well, but since it accepts native RRD options (beside its own set), it's actually easy to bend it at your need, and generating a graph just needs a one-liner:

perl -MRRD::Simple -e 'RRD::Simple->graph("aggr_root_storage.rrd", destination => "/tmp", sources => [ qw{perc_used worst_perc_free} ], width => 1024, height => 768, start => 1288566000, end => 1291158000, periods => [ "daily" ] )'

Or, reindented:

perl -MRRD::Simple -e 
  'RRD::Simple->graph("aggr_root_storage.rrd", 
    destination => "/tmp", 
    sources => [ qw{perc_used worst_perc_free} ], 
    width => 1024, height => 768, 
    start => 1288566000, end => 1291158000, 
    periods => [ "daily" ] )'

The periods options, in this case, has no purpose but to generate only one graph (otherwise you would get many graphs, all equal; why? go and find out yourself, if you really care 😉

And what about plotting a collection of RRDs? It could be something like:

$ for FILE in aggr*.rrd ; do export FILE ; perl -MRRD::Simple -e 'RRD::Simple->graph($ENV{FILE}, destination => "/tmp", width => 1024, height => 768, start => 1288566000, end => 1291158000, periods => [ "daily" ] )' ; done

or, clearer:

$ for FILE in aggr*.rrd ; 
do 
  export FILE ; 
  perl -MRRD::Simple -e 
    'RRD::Simple->graph($ENV{FILE}, 
      destination => "/tmp", 
      width => 1024, height => 768, 
      start => 1288566000, end => 1291158000, 
      periods => [ "daily" ] )' ; 
done

My take into RRDtool

/ bronto / Leave a comment

I confess. Every time I found myself in need for some sort of Round-Robin Database, I took a peek at RRDtool, but that always looked too much complicated, so I gave up and crafted my task-specific tools.

But this time was different. There will be large amounts of data to report on, and a fully hand-crafted solution was not an option. So my RRDtool experience started, and I had to make sense of a number of stuff. But that seems much more understandable now, and I am glad I finally tried it (but much more to do, of course…). … Continue reading →