Yearly graphs aging off data

[roity]

Hi there,

Now that we've been using Cacti for over 6 months we've noticed that all the Yearly graphs are aging off data and only retaining about the last 5 and a bit months so it looks like it's aging data off after a certain number of weeks maybe. For instance, today the 1st of August when I open a yearly graph it only goes as far back as 23rd March 2012. I'm not sure if the data is being rolled over there's a graphing issue. I've gone through the Cacti config GUI and cannot find anything to explain this and have tried to search the forums.

Can someone please advise where to look/adjust? We use our graphs for ongoing monthly reporting and expert to see full history. I have included version details below.

Cacti Version - 0.8.7i
Plugin Architecture - 3.1
Poller Type - Cactid v
Server Info - Linux 2.6.9-78.0.13.ELsmp
Web Server - Apache/2.0.63 (CentOS)
PHP - 5.1.6
PHP Extensions - libxml, xml, wddx, tokenizer, sysvshm, sysvsem, sysvmsg, standard, SimpleXML, sockets, SPL, shmop, session, Reflection, pspell, posix, mime_magic, iconv, hash, gmp, gettext, ftp, exif, date, curl, ctype, calendar, bz2, zlib, pcre, openssl, apache2handler, gd, ldap, mysql, mysqli, PDO, pdo_mysql, pdo_sqlite, snmp, eAccelerator
MySQL - 5.0.68
RRDTool - 1.2.23
SNMP - 5.1.2
Plugins

• PHP Network Weathermap (weathermap - v0.97a)
  Network Tools (tools - v0.3)
  Cacti-ReportIt (reportit - v0.6.1)
  Host Info (hostinfo - v0.2)
  Login Page Mod (loginmod - v1.0)
  Realtime for Cacti (realtime - v0.35)
  Dataquery (dataquery - v0.1.2a)

Cheers,
Dave

[gandalf]

So I bet you're using 1 min polling with unchanged RRA settings (which is bad). Please find the "1min polling" thread in the howto section, explaining all the caveats
R.

[roity]

Thanks for that. I found the Yearly rows set to 797. After reading tekbot's post on page 2 I have a better (not complete! haha) understanding. We just run the defaults (we did originally run 0.86 so I amended the rows figure from 797 and multiplied it by 3 to 2391. Thanks to that post though, I may now consider if we want to change granularity on our remaining graphs or add some RRAs like he did but I realise this requires more work considering we're talking about a system with over 6 months of data! I'll have to re-read the thread/post a couple of times to fully understand the ramification of altering RRAs or adding RRAs.

Hopefully the row change for yearly will at least now end up filling up the yearly graph.

[roity]

OK I'm not sure that did the trick as it lost another line of data, but I've now cleared the polling cache. I can still see only 797 rows of data, but I'll check it again later or tomorrow.

[roity]

Nope, simply adjusting the number of rows and rebuilding the poller cache did not resolve the issue - can you possibly shed any more light on this?

By the way, we never converted from 5 minute to 1 minute polling, we started with 1 minute polling "out of the box".

[roity]

The existing RRD file info is not being updated, still stuck on rows 797..

[roity]

Rightio, I've sussed this out. Incase there are any other basic not so experienced users out there *like me* then I recommend any fresh Cacti installs have the RRA numbers fixed in the GUI before logging any data as 797 rows is not enough for the default 1 minute polling to capture a whole year, I would round off and pick 2000 rows to ensure you cover 12+ months of data to fill the graph. My resolution to this though is;

http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc/rrdresize.en.html
This can be easily used to add rows to where you see 797. If you only have a few RRA files, then it wont take long to use this to fix them on a case by case basis. If you have hundreds though...

http://docs.cacti.net/manual:087:8_rrdtool.04_resize
This will do the rrdresize in bulk, I'm about to get some help from a colleague to test this out.