Collectl Utilities
	Latest Version: 2.5.0 Oct 8, 2009

The focus of collectl is efficient data collection and display of performance data on a single machine. This set of utilities have been developed to enhace the use of collectl in 2 dimensions:

• graphics
• multi-system support

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 ones 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 are being updated in real-time, colplot can show a dynamic plot. 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.

Colgui is a utility whose focus is to display reasonably dense real-time graphics for one or more systems by starting collectl and directing it to send its output back to itself. Colgui requires perl-tk to build the graphics, which unfortunately is not the most efficient way to do this. However it seems to work reasonably well for less than 10 or 20 systems and could actually be a good starting point for someone who might like to build their own implementation. While this tool does provide nice demos, my graphical tool of choice is colplot and I rarely use colgui, which may also be why it's had the least testing.

Multi-system Support

As already described above, both colplot and colgui support multiple systems and for looking at many types of data, particularly of a historical nature, colplot is really the only way to go. However, there are times when you're really only interested in looking at one or two types of data in real-time on multiple systems and trying to watch multiple plots can make it more difficult to see odd behaviors. This is where colmux comes in. Like colgui, this utility starts collectl running on a number of systems and directs them to send their output back but rather than display graphics it displays columns of text for a small number of user-specifiied data elements. By displaying this data in a compact form of one row/sample, it makes it very easy to see a high-level view of what all systems are doing and if any misbehave they're very easy to identify.