real time traffic monitoring with rrd

Question

Is there any way to monitor bandwidth in visualization form with RRDTool?

Answer 1

Kind of, i.e. with MRTG by the same author, which uses rrdtool for generating graphics. Other tools as Cacti etc. might work as well.

RRDtool is only a completely generic graphing tool and it will plot whatever data you feed it.

Edit: I overlooked the "real time" part when answering. In this case, I assume rrdtool is not the right tool for you, as it is designed to be updated maybe once a minute or every five minutes or something like that. However, theoretically it should be possible to store data with a resolution down to a second and update a graph accordingly.

BTW, please look through the answers for your question and see if they solved your problems. If they did, accept them.

Answer 2

If you don't HAVE to use RRDTool, you could look at Graphite, which uses a processing backend called "carbon" that stores data in a database called "whisper". It's very "realtime".
http://graphite.wikidot.com/faq#toc0

Answer 3

RRDtool is not meant for real-time, as Sven mentions.

On the command line, we are often using the old iptraf tool. It updates its counters every few seconds.