Penguin
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If you know MRTG, you can think of rrdtool as a reimplementation of MRTGs graphing and logging features. It describes itself as 'magnitudes faster and more flexible than you ever thought possible'.

RRD is an Acronym for Round Robin Database. (This is a database implementation of a RoundRobinArchive?). RRD is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it presents useful graphs by processing the data to enforce a certain data density. It can be used either via simple wrapper scripts (from shell or Perl) or via frontends that poll network devices and put a friendly user interface on it.

The best front end for the job seems to be Cacti, though you can make MRTG use rrdtool as a backend.