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 always 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 want to look at what's going on
(or went on in the past) on your cluster and want to see real numbers.
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.
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 can either sort the results
by a column of your choice, displaying only as many lines as will fit in your terminal window
OR display columns of text for that small number of user-specifiied data elements. By
displaying this data in these two compact forms it makes it very easy to see a high-level view
of what all systems in your cluster are doing and if any misbehave they're very easy to identify.
Colmux Tutorial!