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