Dieter on the web

When you use rrdtool, it can happen that you first create your databases, then collect a whole bunch of data and decide later you want more accuracy/longer periods.
Especially when using zenoss (the monitoring solution I mostly work with at Kangaroot), which uses very conservative RRD settings by default (i.e. 5-minute intervals for only the first 50 hours). Zenoss provides a way for you to change the way RRD's are created, but not to apply those settings to already existing RRD files, which I found out *after* I started monitoring everything ;)

rrdresize can help: it (just) adds or removes locations for rows.
In my case it was not good enough because zenoss uses a variety of resolutions (step sizes), and so if you add rows to all of them rrdtool - when graphing - will often pick a higher resolution RRA that just had rows added (and hence contain unknown values), even though you have the values, albeit at a lower resolution.

So you need a way to update all rows in the RRA's.
I found a perl tool that does just that. (I think, I didn't study all details). So, you install that in your /home/zenoss for instance and then you run the following script, which creates new rrd files with the new settings and uses the perl script to copy all data into it.

#!/bin/sh
# invoke me like this:
# find /usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/perf/ -name '*.rrd' -exec ./newrrd.sh {} \; >> newrrd-logfile

file=$1
backupdir=/home/zenoss/rrds-backup
newdir=/home/zenoss/rrds-new
[ -d "$backupdir" ] || mkdir -p "$backupdir" || exit 2
[ -d "$newdir"    ] || mkdir -p "$newdir" || exit 2
[ -f "$file"      ] || exit 3

echo "Processing $file .."
base="`basename "$file"`"
[ ! -f "$backupdir/$base" ] || mv "$backupdir/$base" "$backupdir/$base".old || exit 4
cp "$file" "$backupdir/$base"
cd "$newdir" && rrdtool create "$base" \
--step '300' \
--start '1230768000' \
'DS:ds0:GAUGE:900:U:U' \
'RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:122640' \
'RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:6:55536' \
'RRA:MAX:0.5:6:55536'
/home/zenoss/rrdremove.pl "$backupdir/$base" "$base" | grep -v 2009 # hide some output
cp "$base" "$file" || exit 5
echo "Done"

Oh and btw, rrdwizard is a cool webapp when you're feeling too lazy/have forgotten how to write rrdtool commands