I wanted to give kudos to Tobi Oetiker for receiving the 2006 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for the creation of the Open Source Software tools MRTG and RRDtool at the LISA event in Washington DC this week.MRTG and RRDtool are freely (as in freedom and in free beer) available software tools for the collection and graphical display of time series data and are mainly deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. Disclosure – RRDtool is integrated into our GroundWork Monitor Professional IT infrastructure monitoring solution and Tobi sits on the Open Source Council we launched in August at LinuxWorld. SAGE (the USENIX special interest group for sysadmins) had some nice things to say about the project and the developers. “Before the creation of these tools, the only people that could reap the benefits of long-term, historical statistics gathering were people with multimillion dollar budgets. MRTG and RRDtool democratized, and therefore popularized, historical data collection. As a result, network utilization planning has gone from being guesswork to a fine art. These tools have also been leveraged to track a wide array of resources ranging from disk I/O stats to CPU and memory usage to license server data.Thanks to Tobias, Dave, and their team, system and network administrators are no longer limited to fire-fighting when our resources are overloaded. We can now easily access network and system data in an intuitive form to predict and plan for upgrades months in advance.”Check out the tools if you get a chance – great functionality, thriving community. Technology Industry