The official RANGES home page

What is RANGES?

RANGES is a combination of shell script and embedded awk scripts which utilise various internal and external programs and optional user-provided scripts, along with RRDTOOL as a data-storage and graphing tool.

RANGES main benefits are a very simple yet flexible configuration for data collection, an efficient single-source collection of any given data element regardless of how many times it is subsequently used, the ability to graph an arbitary number of data sources on a graph, to replicate or move data between graphs and change the display format to suit - all without losing historical data.

RANGES also incoroprates alarms, to alert you (or others) when data is outside thresholds you specify, and/or to run commands or scripts under these circumstances.

RANGES collects all data at once, after which all alarm monitoring, graphing etc is performed. It is possible to run multiple collection threads and/or to have the collection run seperately to graphing.

History

Ranges was originally conceived as a "demonstration" of how one of the common unix tools, awk could be used to do non-trivial tasks. RANGES is an acronym for "Ross And Nick Graph Everything Simply". RANGES main purpose in life was to overcome some of the limitations of MRTG at the time - particularly the requirements for at most two variables per graph, the relative difficulty to import data from sources other than SNMP, the inefficiency of having to re-read data from sources if they were to be used in more than one graph and that data could not be "re-arranged" or moved between graphs at a later time.

Since the original version was released to a closed group of friends in May 2000, comments, suggestions and feature-requests, along with our own in-house needs has seen RANGES learn various new tricks.


Where do I get RANGES?

The latest version of RANGES is available here.
A sample configuration file has enough examples and notes to get you started.
Mark Russell, one of the early adopters of RANGES was motivated enough to roll a FreeBSD port which checks for required dependancies etc. Thanks heaps Mark!

What can I graph with RANGES?

You can graph basically anything you can describe in numerical terms. Some of the things people have graphed include:
There are no doubt lots of other things people have graphed, these are just a few. You are really only limited by your imagination. As long as you can collect data using a script or program (or SNMP) and return a number, ranges can graph it.