Greg Wooledge <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 06, 2026 at 09:33:07 +0000, Chris Green wrote: > > > https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/datasources/ > > > > > Hmm, I took a look at that, it's **huge** and **complex**. All I want > > to do is plot values against time, grafana is massive overkill for > > doing that. > > I know I'm repeating myself, but this whole thread has been going in > circles for a couple days now, so once again: rrdtool does exactly > what you want. > I've had a hard look at rrdtool and, while it does some of what I want, it's not really what I'm looking for.
> First, you define a round robin database with whatever parameters are > appropriate for your data. This is the hard part. You come up with > a plan like "I will collect data every minute, and store that data > for 30 days, and store averaged data for 360 days." > I don't want to work like this. The 'round robin' part of it simply isn't what I'm after. I want ways of handling different length chunks of data I'm accumulating over days, weeks months, etc. So I may want to look at today's results and then look at a week in the middle of last year to compare. > Then you set up a cron job to collect your data point every minute or > whatever, and those go into your database. > > Whenever you like, then, you can tell rrdtool to generate a graph of the > last hour, or the last day, or the last 30 days, or whatever you need. Looking at rdtool I don't really see how it works for all these different time periods. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it completely. I **want** a database that grows! :-) It's not as if the amount of data is going to get unmanageable. I have similar data acquired for other reasons that I find useful very often simply **because** it goes back over many years. I have one database with values from the last 15 years and it's only about 8Mb. -- Chris Green ·
