# RRDtool

6 Hacker News commenters recommended RRDtool and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend RRDtool for simple, self-hosted time-series storage and graphing, and say it is still relevant. Critics cite its performance and limited feature set.

## Why people recommend it

- Simple self-hosted monitoring and graphing (2 comments): "rrdtool conbined with graphite was powerful back then when metrics and logging was selfhosted" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291248)) "I yearn for the simplicity of rrdtool and Cacti and all that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690831))
- Still relevant and useful today (4 comments): "I use rrdtool to this day, as a building block" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47290908)) "can also look at the good ol' RRDtool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172590)) "Oh rrdtool is still relevant today." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291266))

## What people warn about

- Performance and feature set complaints (2 comments): "I was unhappy recently with performance and feature set in RRDTool." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49952009)) "instead of a larger time span taking ~5 seconds to update" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608862))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [VictoriaMetrics](https://hackerapproved.com/p/victoriametrics.md): 26 recommend
- [TimescaleDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/timescaledb.md): 21 recommend
- [Grafana Mimir](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mimir.md): 12 recommend
- [kdb+ by KX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kdb-plus.md): 9 recommend
- [InfluxDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/influxdb.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "RRDtool", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rrdtool/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).