06/11/2008

RRDtool announced the release of RRDtool 1.3. The new release includes additional capabilities and functionalities.

ebizQ received the following:

"RRDtool is the logging and graphing standard,” said Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO Dynamic Network Services Incorporated. “It allows us to make sense of any arbitrary data source whether it's network statistics, server trending, customer support loads, customer purchases, and financial transaction volume."

RRDtool is designed to make network utilization planning possible and track a wide array of resources from disk I/O stats to CPU stats. By storing data in Round Robin Databases (RRDs) that maintain a fixed size over time, RRDtool eliminates the growth of data files, reducing the risk of overwhelming available disk storage. At the heart of the technology is the tool’s ability to average and compress data on the fly based on customizable parameters.

"It impresses me that they maintained backwards compatibility yet added so many new features and improvements. The performance gain alone is reason to upgrade," said Thomas A. Limoncelli, IT consultant and co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration.

New functionalities of RRDtool 1.3 include:

• New file access methods and functions that implement both file-descriptor and full mmap-based file access with madvise hinting for improved scalability, by reducing the cache memory-footprint.
• New graphing capabilities, including full gridfitting, an improved horizontal grid, a new graph interface providing additional meta information on the graph content, as well as support for Pango markup.
• New forecasting with a new MHWPREDICT consolidation function for data whose seasonal variations grow or shrink in proportion to the average.
• Rewrites to make RRDtool more modular, as well as more tolerant to XML variations.
• Improved Python bindings, and new graph interface support for Ruby, Perl and Python.

"We're thrilled to be supporting the ongoing work on RRDtool," states Peter Mui, Community Director of GroundWork Open Source, the inaugural Gold Sponsor of RRDtool. "RRDtool adds critical underlying Data Collection and Management to support GroundWork Monitor's advanced graphing and reporting capabilities. There are hundreds of existing and emerging open source packages that interoperate with RRDtool that you can also access through GroundWork Monitor. Our products and our customers gain enormous leverage from it."

RRDtool Project Lead Tobi Oetiker also holds a seat on GroundWork Open Source's Project Lead Council, which also includes the project leads for Nagios, Ganglia and Cacti, among others.