folks new tool of potential operational ISP interest from Tobi (author of MRTG, visiting CAIDA on sabbatical this summer): http://www.caida.org/Tools/RRDtool/ if you use/like MRTG, check out RRDtool (Round Robin Database), which is basically the time-series graphing and data storage/management component of MRTG, broken out and `done right'. (--tobi) `done right' == much more flexible/configurable, (but still supports lots of auto-config stuff for folks w better things to do...) perhaps more importantly: orders of magnitude faster/scalable, stores data compactly so as not to expand over time so RRDtool provides a powerful building block for other frontends, couple of which you may have seen: http://www.caida.org/Tools/RRDtool/frontends/ & can also be used via simple wrapper scripts (e.g., sh/perl) also: RRD tool can now produce png images as well as gif (due to the increasing copyright sensitivity surrounding gif format. gif still default output format, but no more lzw compression. png better technical solution anyway, if legaljunk isn't compelling enough argument to switch. discussing this issue further on nanog@ would be a good way to get me killed for even mentioning it (for those w that goal)) portability: should run on most reasonable unices (and actually runs on NT.. ), but we're grateful for feedback/experiences to tobi@caida.org. licensing: http://www.caida.org/Tools/RRDtool/license.html (i always suspected karma was measureable in music. tho i reckon CDnow should send tobi some royalties): note Tobi wrote RRDtool mostly on his own time (True Knight), been refining it this summer while at CAIDA & releasing incremental pre-1.0 versions to dev list for a while but reckons it's finally nanog-strength his next windmill.caida is re-working MRTG itself, which makes now an optimal time for ISPs to provide input on what additions to MRTG would enhance its utility for them tobi@caida.org (so far, he's got requests/plans for: running as daemon as well as from cron; simpler interface for polling data of various datasources; template-based webpage generation both static and on demand; better config paradigm (perl-module-based) 95th percentile plotting ) tnx, k and tobi @caida.org