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MRTG and Cactii are very popular open source solutions for charting network performance metrics. MRTG uses a circular table data storage mechanism with progressive aggregation which keeps the size of the databases relatively small, and more importantly, fixed in maximum size.
The graphs generated by MRTG are on-demand - data is extracted from the RRD databases and the graphs are generated on the fly.
Issues with MRTG & Cactii
Both MRTG and Cactii are data collection and graphings tools. They do not provide proactive analysis of the data as it is collected. Also, the data is stored in flat files and complex queries cannot be performed across the data like in a relational database.
So while the above products are very useful for drawing graphs and analysing the data manually, if one is collecting hundreds of metrics it is not practical to click on a hundred graphs every day and manually look at each graph for problems on a daily basis.
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