Tutorials and explanations

Featuring "the tutorial", and more. Please do bookmark this page, and feel free to link to this page on your website.

Intro

I am a user of MRTG and RRDtool for a long time. I also contributed some code to RRDtool and provided some manual pages. Last but not least I have spend and still spend quite some time on the mailing lists. I am also an RRDtool programmer in the sense that I write scripts for others. Like many people I'm hesitant to call myself an expert but I truly believe it is safe for me to do so in the RRDtool case.

I try to share my knowledge. I do this in my own way, not only telling how stuff works but also why. If you don't like that style then please do read the manual pages, not the tutorials.

Some of my contributions are included in the RRDtool source package, see the sections called "documentation" and "Tutorials" on Tobi's rrdtool webpage. Some of it I present here on this site. Please link to it in stead of copying it; this assures the most recent version is available.

Much information has been corrected for spelling errors and/or other improvements have been made by others. Thank you very much, you know who you are.

The information is made available to you free of charge. However, if you choose to make a donation I am most grateful and will consider it to be an encouragement to spend more time on RRDtool programming and documenting. You can also hire me as a consultant. Details below.

List of tutorials and the like

• Shifting data on the X-axis and/or the Y-axis talks about STACK and SHIFT
• Computing amount of data transfered when you want the TOTAL amount
• Rates, normalizing and consolidating explains how RRDtool processes its input data, normalization and consolidation are described there as well as some generic stuff about the properties of an RRA
• UTC, Time Zones and how to cope with it from RRDtool perspective explains how you can live in one timezone yet display your data in another.
• Minimum, average and maximum Why, and how, to use them.
• Daylight saving aka Summertime shows how RRDtool copes with it.
• Describing the past, not predicting the future avoid a mistake easily made.
• RRDtool create tutorial with examples teaches you how to instruct RRDtool to build a database
• RRDtool update tutorial with examples teaches you how to feed numbers to your database
• RRDtool graph --x-grid tutorial with examples helps you fight that pesky --x-grid parameter
• RRDtool graph AREA, LINE and STACK tutorial with examples stacking an area on top of a line
• "the" rrdtool tutorial. It is also included in the source tar ball, in various packages and it can also be found on Tobi's website. It is Translated into French, Spanish and Japanese by other RRDtool enthusiasts.
• My tutorial on binary, decimal and hexadecimal can be found in many places, amongst them the rrdtool packages
• Using CDEFs, dito.
• I also wrote the initial version of many manual pages in the rrdtool package.

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This page was created by Alex van den Bogaerdt, an independent IT consultant. If you want to provide feedback or if you want to hire me please see .
This page is free information. You are under no obligation to do so but I would welcome your donation and see it as encouragement to spend more time on RRDtool support and coding. Please consider donating some money into my paypal account.