Yesterday I talked about mrtg breaking. Today, I want to explain, why I am using mrtg for logging on my homeserver.

So what are the alternatives?

munin is mrtg a little extended. I actually liked it and always intended to migrate some of my logging systems to it. But never got to it. One really nice feature is multi node/networked logging. If you have multiple boxes and want logging in a central place, munin might be an option. But that's about it. I don't really see, what I would win by switching to munin.

collectd is really a fancy upgrade. It's very efficient. So efficient, that they run the loggers every 10 s instead of every 5 min. We run collectd on one server, where we log a lot and like the resolution. It also has the networking option. If you want something advanced, go, look at it.

So why am I still using mrtg on my box?

1. I'm lazy, really.
2. I even run mrtg the old style, without rrd. Because I like to remove broken data from my graphs. Doing that on the fly with rrd is no fun. But doing it in text files is easy, really.
3. There are like two dozen web frontends for it. Half of them use php (I don't want php on my box, really). The next bunch is outdated or are generic rrd frontends. Which leaves us basicly with:

• collection. This one is included with collectd. It works. It needs some quirks, but it works. We actually use this one on one box.
• collectd-web: I just stumbled again over it and am considering to reinvestigate it.
• graphite: That's the highend answer. From the quick review, this one takes a long time to setup. So that's not an option. I want someting quick and easy.