Steve Shipway <[email protected]> wrote:

> If your metrics are all coming in the same file, for the same point in time, 
> and all being pushed into the RRD at the same time, then it makes sense to 
> have a single RRD to hold them as in your example.  You would usually use a 
> separate RRD if the data came separately, potentially for different times.  
> Then separate RRD would make sense as you may get one sample but not another, 
> or they were sampled at differing times.

To add to that, also consider how things may change over time. Eg, suppose you 
are logging disk/filesystem utilisation - both in terms of data transferred, 
and space used/available.

It would make sense to collate all the quantities from one filesystem into a 
single RRD - so perhaps an RRD with bytes written, bytes read, % space used, 
$inodes used. But, a machine will almost certainly have multiple filesystems, 
and more importantly the number may change - so it would make sense to have one 
RRD/filesystem. Of course, there may well be more than one filesystem on a disk 
- so you might want to collect stats for the physical disk (probably just bytes 
read/written) into one RRD, and have a separate RRD for each physical disk (or 
array) since the number of physical disks/arrays may change (eg if you add a 
disk because you've run out of space).

There isn't really a right and wrong. It's perfectly OK to have lots of small 
RRDs with a single DS each. It's also perfectly OK to have fewer RRDs with many 
DSs each. It's a matter of balancing your requirements with the ability to 
manage the RRDs - and of course, as mentioned above, the requirement to update 
all DSs in a single RRD at the same time.

I tend to use a mixture.
At one extreme I have an RRD for our UPS stats with many parameters logged, and 
another with 508 DSs (data in and out for all 254 usable addresses in our /24 
subnet) - in both cases, data is collected and graphed with custom scripts, and 
all the data is collected in a single operation.
At the other extreme, I have a whole bunch of RRDs with just 2 DSs (data in and 
out) - one per port for a bunch of switches (the data is collected and graphed 
with Cacti), and the data for each port is collected separately (it's the way 
Cacti works).

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