An Inside Look Behind the Creator of MRTG and RRDTool, Tobias Oetiker
Tobias Oetiker, the creator of MRTG and RRDTool, traveled from Switzerland to LISA this year for fun and to teach. He delivered an array of training courses and talks on some of his software that has become the de-facto standard for open source monitoring and graphing solutions.
In 1998 Oetiker came to LISA on a student grant and presented a paper on the Multi Router Traffic Grapher: http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa98/full_papers/oetiker/oetiker_html/oetiker.html.
I asked Tobias why he thought MRTG and RRDTool are so popular for powering most modern network and performance trending solutions? Oetiker explained that there were no network monitoring tools at the time that could trend and graph usage over time, so he had to write it himself.
MRTG grew in popularity and was being used for network monitoring but and for very unconventional uses such as trending wave size at the Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California.
RRDTool was created soon after MRTG to expand MRTG’s shortcoming of only accepting two data-sources. The idea behind RRDTool was to allow for a time-series database with the ability to create graphs. It is an all-in-one solution created specifically to solve the
[...] November 26, 2008 by MatthewSacks While at LISA 2008 this year I interviewed Tobias Oetiker on some of the history of MRTG and RRDTool. We spoke about some of the reasons behind coming to LISA in years past and present. The primary reason for Oetiker’s travels was that he enjoys to teach and actually was the first place that he presented MRTG to the public. MRTG was created to graph network link usage over time, and at the time there were no tools to accomplish the task. MRTG and RRDTool have grown into the de-facto network and performance trending solutions and are now being used to trend all kinds of things, including atmospheric and tidal trends. Read about it on the LISA blog here. [...]
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