On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Blake wrote: > My personal opinion is that effort should be put into > the RRDTool plugin because it is much lighter then > storing DB data over a period of time (I also think > the data stored in a DB is incomplete...not sure of > the details), and RRDTool is great for this purpose. > > Really, all I would really want to do is be able to > distinguish when the statistics were collected > preferably a 24 hour period, then average that over a > week, month, etc.). > > What do you want to do with all that data anyway? > RRDTool should collect the data over a 24 hour period, > save the stats, and start over again ... something > like MRTG. But I guess this all depends on what kind > of information you need from NTOP. > > Any thoughts?
I'm generally in agreement, but I do have a bit of a different perspective. I think for most folks that rrdtool is probably a better tool for managing network-related data than MySQL. My biggest beef with rrdtool is that it seems more complex than necessary to set the thing up for long-term historical record keeping. (Yes, I've read the man page a zillion times, but most pages don't take that many passes to sink in.) In some sense rrdtool seems biased against long-term archive storage by design. And I get that there are plenty of perfectly fine reasons for that, but most of those reasons aren't big on my list. And all of the Perl interfaces for rrdtool go through pipes to communicate with the command-line tool which just seems really nasty. So, obviously MySQL doesn't have the rrdtool biases and Perl's DBI is the anti-tower-of-babel to databases, but MySQL lacks the summarization features and space-efficiency. I really don't care much about the space efficiency, but there's no need to burn through ever tick of data when doing long-term analysis, so some sort of summarization (with optional archival) process will eventually need to be grafted onto MySQL. But as it is, MySQL can handle replication pretty decently and it chews through heaps of data pretty well. OpenView and Solstice grafted the summarization and archival features onto various SQL databases, and it doesn't strike me as being that hard to fill in that gap in a reasonably general way. (It'd make a nice little project for an intern even.) Anyway, that's more background. I'm still an ntop newbie wondering how any of this would fit into ntop best. Later on Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Blake wrote: > oh before I get hit for this one ... I know RRDTool is > a DB ... when I say DB I mean like MySQL or something. It didn't confuse me at least. :) -- </chris> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg _______________________________________________ Ntop mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ntop.org/mailman/listinfo/ntop
