[collectd] Smoothing out rate based graphs

[Jesse Reynolds]

Hello

I'm using the tail plugin to populate an RRD with the rate of notifications sent by a monitoring system. The rate rarely goes above 0.1, which initially had me confused before I realised that 0.1 for 10 seconds adds up to 1. 

But what I'd like to graph is a rate per hour, so add up all the pages sent in the last hour and log that metric instead of the per second, high resolution rate. 

Is there an inbuilt way to do this in collectd? If not, what would people recommend? Perhaps ditch the tail plugin and write my own collection script using exec plugin? Or write a collection script which looks at the existing per second data being captured by the RRDs? Or something else? 

Thank you
Jesse