Using rrdtool to generate server load & bandwidth graphs

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:32:25 +0000

I’ve been using MRTG and routers2.cgi for years to graph the various aspects of a server that warrant monitoring. I’ve long known that they used something called rrdtool to do… well, something, but never had a need or desire to figure out exactly what that was.

But, having just moved my site to a new server, I was curious how the server would handle the load. Rather than setting up some behemoth like Nagios or Zabbix, which are full monitoring/alerting suites, I just wanted graphing. As I said, in the past I’ve used MRTG or routers2.cgi for this but both of them were overkill for me in this case. Since both of them used rrdtool, I figured that was a good place to look.

Load on Evan Hoffman

Using rrdtool to generate server load & bandwidth graphs