DST (Data Source Type) defines the type of the DS. It can be COUNTER, DERIVE, ABSOLUTE, GAUGE. A DS declared as COUNTER will save the rate of change of the value over a step period. This assumes that the value is always increasing (the difference between the current and the previous value is greater than 0). Traffic counters on a router are an ideal candidate for using COUNTER as DST. DERIVE is the same as COUNTER, but it allows negative values as well. If you want to see the rate of change in free disk space on your server, then you might want to use the DERIVE data type. ABSOLUTE also saves the rate of change, but it assumes that the previous value is set to 0. The difference between the current and the previous value is always equal to the current value. Thus it just stores the current value divided by the step interval (300 seconds in our example). GAUGE does not save the rate of change. It saves the actual value itself. There are no divisions or calculations. Memory consumption in a server is a typical example of gauge. The difference between the different types DSTs can be explained better with the following example: