LISA 2007 Tutorial

RRDtool as a Communication Tool
===============================
A half day tutorial by Tobias Oetiker

Abstract
--------
Over the last few years RRDtool has become the standard method for handling
time-series data in the networking area. RRDtool takes care of all the work
related to data storage and presentation. Many users only access
RRDtool through some front-end application like Cacti or Cricket. 

In this two hour tutorial you will learn how RRDtool works from a
programmers point of view, and how you can use it to write your own custom
monitoring applications. An emphasis will be put on presentation aspects.
The best data is worth only as much as your bosses and customers understand
and appreciate the graphs you create with it.

Attendees are expected to have some scripting experience.

Topics
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* RRDtool Overview

  * Problems to be solved
  * Round Robin Database setup
  * Data acquisition
  * Graphing

* Programming with RRDtool

  * The command line interface
  * The pipe interface
  * The Perl api

* In-Depth Graphing 

  * Concepts
  * Simple graphs
  * The joy of RPN
  * Graph disassembly
  * How to make graphs talk

* Scaling RRDtool 

  * The RRD file format
  * Optimizing OS interaction
  * Tweaking Linux for speed

About the Speaker
-----------------

Tobias Oetiker is an electrical engineer by education and a system
administrator by vocation. For ten years he has been working for the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, providing students
and staff with a deluxe Unix workstation environment. Last year he
started his own company OETIKER+PARTNER AG, running Unix servers for
industry customers, improving his pet open source projects MRTG,
RRDtool, and SmokePing, and applying these tools to solve the customers'
problems.

In November 2006, Tobias received the prestigious SAGE Outstanding
Achievement Award for his work on MRTG and RRDtool.

Find out more about the Speaker on http://tobi.oetiker.ch