Collectl Utilities: colplot
	Latest Version: 5.0.0, April 28, 2015
	This is the last official release of collectl-utils! Colplot is now a tarball and has been moved to the collectl directory

The focus of collectl has always been efficient performance data collection and its display on a single machine. Colplot is a web-based plotting utility that uses gnuplot to generate plots against collectl-generated files that have been generated in plot format. The sample plot on the collectl home page was generated with colplot.

There are over 70 standard plots and a definition language that allows you to define your own if none of the existing plots meet your needs. If there are files for more than one system, colplot will generate separate plots for each system. Colplot also has an option that allows it to periodically redisplay the plots, which means if the files you point it to files that are being updated in real-time, colplot can plot then in real-time. It can also save plots as invidual png files, as pdf files if ghostscript is installed or even email them to you. There is also a command line interface that will run on an X-enabled terminal.

Colplot supports plot generation for multiple systems at a time and for looking at the many types of collectl data as a set of plots, colplot is really the only way to go. However, there are times when you want to look at what's going on (or went on in the past) on your cluster and want to see real numbers in which case you can always look at the data with collectl.

How many times is top the very first utility you run to see what's happening on your system? Colmux can do just that for an entire cluster of systems, supporing the ability to run virtually any collectl command in a top-like fashion, complete with sorting by any column. Sometimes you may be only interested in looking at one or two types of data as a single row of numbers, watching for changes in behaviors between lines. Colmux supports this form of output as well.

I've tried really hard to keep the quality of collectl, colmux and colplot up to the highest standards by eating my own dog food and use collectl, colmux and colplot continually to see what's happening with all the servers in HP's Public Cloud.

With the releases of both collectl 4.0.0 and collectl-utils 4.8.3, the decision was made to move colmux to the collectl kit. Furthermore, with release 5.0.0 colplot is now its own tarball, which can now be found in the same sourceforge repository as collectl itself, making for one-stop shopping.

updated April 28, 2015