[drraw-users] documentation, FAQ, wiki.. (Was: Trying to create a Grouped Dashboard with Templates Style Regex)

[Eric Law]

Including Dashboards inside pages:

try using wget or even running the drraw.cgi from the command line
(just use the URL as an arg).... strip out any headers (if any) and
you should be able to script the process of 'embedding' drraw.cgi into
your own pages.

TREND function:

For examples of TREND function, see
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/gallery/index.en.html
search for drraw.cgi or trend on the page to see an example.....
http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/2006/May/04
to see more concrete example....
this page is one I found that happened to have some demo's of
jQuery javascript framework to AJAX like applications.
I've since started using that a bit... it's very nice to use.

Holt+Winters:

I cannot afford to apply Holt+Winters to all my RRDs....
our NetApp filter is IO bound as it is.
Even applying it to 10% of my data would likely cause me problems.

Alternates to Cricket:

The latest cricket likely _is_ able to write descriptive names to datasources,
but I think it's an option you need to turn on.  I've already got too
much history
with older RRD files to migrate.
Cricket development appears to be dead, even from when I was using it years ago.
(I also used drraw.cgi years ago too...)
Cacti (and at the time Orca) were similar projects, but cacti was rather new.
.... but I've never looked at them.
There is MORE stuff out there that integrates opensource monitoring
solutions too,
so dont limit your search to just Cacti.
We are moving towards more 'enterprise' class monitoring solutions, so
many of those options are not available (scalability is a big concern,
as are dead/dying opensource projects (I used to use MON which is also
basically dead).

Who uses what:

Beware impressions from conferences (they are a double-edged sword)....
I had the impression from Usenix 99 that no one in their right mind uses Linux,
and now I'm at a company that has been using it extensively and has
thousands of Linux servers!  It all depends on who you meet I guess.


On 12/20/06, David wrote:
> On 12/19/06, Eric Law <ericslaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thus far, I've been able to use drraw to provide the odd-ball cases
> > they are asking for without having to modify code or hard-code HTML
> > (like most of the more technical of my customers already do... now if
> > they would just use proper APIs instead of deep linking to TEMP
> > data!).
> >
>
> That reminds me of one of the features I want to add to drraw.  I want
> to add an embeddable mode, where you can call drraw from within
> another CGI and have it output the HTML for a particular
> graph/template/dashboard.  In particular the front page of
> http://stats.net.cmu.edu basically contains the content of one of my
> drraw dashboards, but everytime I update the dashboard I have to
> cut-n-paste the HTML into that page.  I'd rather have a "include
> dashboard #XXXXX here" feature.
>
>
>
> > It might be nice to have 'canned' week-over-week functionality, but it
> > likely doable via some kind of recipe.  I've come across use of a
> > TREND feature in RRDTool too, so that would be nice to expose (might
> > only be development or beta or somesuch).
>
> I haven't seen that, the only trending stuff I've seen is the Holt
> Winters code.  Any idea where you saw it?
>
> >
> > Folks where I work would love to see some kind of holt+winters
> > forecasting too, but it's a real bear to modify the RRDs to support
> > those.  But that has little to do with drraw (unless you have
> > Holt+Winters RRAs within your RRDs.... which I dont).
> >
>
> I swear I figured out how to do this at one point, maybe I just did a
> dump/edit/restore by hand.  These days I have the HWPREDICT stuff
> enabled in my top level cricket defaults, so they exist in all the
> data.
>
>
>
> > Integration with cricket datasource names would be nice too... right
> > now everything is 'ds0,ds1,ds2', so I have to manually map them.
> >
>
> If I understand correctly the currect cricket code uses descriptive
> names in the rrd datasources.  Of course that requires re-creating the
> rrds...
>
> However at LISA I got the impression that no one is using cricket any
> more...  Most of the folks at the rrdtool bof were using Cacti.  I'm
> thinking I may look into Cacti again, it sounds like its gotten a lot
> better then the last time I looked at it.
>
>
> -David
>