Round Robin Database Tools ========================== It is pretty easy to gather status information from all sorts of things, ranging from the temperature in your office to the number of octets which have passed through the FDDI interface of your router. But it is not so trivial to store this data in a efficient and systematic manner. This is where RRDtool kicks in. It lets you log and analyze the data you gather from all kinds of data-sources (DS). The data analysis part of RRDtool is based on the ability to quickly generate graphical representations of the data values collected over a definable time period. To compile: ----------- sh configure make <------ GNU make make install <------ GNU make This will configure, compile and install RRDtool in /usr/local/rrdtool-VERSION. If you prefer to install RRDtool in some other place, use sh configure --prefix=/some/other/RRDtool-dir If you prefer to live with shared libraries, make sure you add the --enable-shared option to your configure call. sh configure --enable-shared The configure script will try to find your perl installation (5.004 preferred). If it does not find it, you can still build RRDtool but no perl modules will be generated. By default the perl modules will be installed under the RRDtool install directory. This will require you to use a 'use lib' statement in your RRDtool perl programs. If you do not care what happens to your site-perl directory, you can also use make site-perl-install will install the perl modules whereever you keep your local perl modules. Doing this reliefs you from using 'use lib' in your scripts. Configure will also look for an TCL installation on your system. If it finds one it will build a TCL interface for rrdtool. If you keep tcl in a non standard location you can use sh configure --with-tcllib=/sw/tcl-8.3/lib to indicte the right version (note, this must point to the directory where tclConfig.sh is located). Note that install will integrate the tcl bindings into your tcl installation. It will use a separate directory for each version though, so this is not much of a problem. Never the less the TCL module will not get intalled by default as TCL wants its module in the base tcl installation where you might not be able to write to. So if you want the tcl stuff installed, type make site-tcl-install Getting Started: ---------------- Either after compiling or after installing you can try the example RRDtool applications in the examples directory. To learn: --------- Read the documentation in the doc directory. Start of with RRDtool. All documents are available as html and as ASCII text. If you are looking for a more slow paced introduction, make sure to read Alex van den Bogaerdt's rrdtutorial which is also available from the doc directory. Also read his cdeftutorial and Steve Rader's rpntutorial. If you want to know about the format of the log files check src/rrd_format.h there are a lot of comments in there ... How to make Tobi happy: ----------------------- If you want to show your appreciation for RRDtool you could make me happy by going to ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/wish and ordering a CD from my CD wish list ... How to keep in touch: --------------------- There are 3 Mailing lists for RRDtool: rrd-announce LOW volume RRDtool Announcements List (Only Stable Releases) rrd-users For discussion amongst people who use RRDtool in their applications rrd-developers For people who actually HACK RRDtool code To subscribe to send a message with the subject 'subscribe' to -request@list.ee.ethz.ch. Note, that postings to rrd-announce will always be cross-posted to rrd-users and rrd-developers as well. To Contribute: -------------- Contributed feature and bug patches are most welcome. But please send complete patches. A complete patch patches the CODE as well as the CHANGES, CONTRIBUTORS and the POD files. Use GNU diff --unified --recursive olddir newdir to build your patches. The latest Version: ------------------- Is available from http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/ Tobias Oetiker