Charting It Up for the Suits

A picture’s worth a thousand words. Doubly so when doing performance analysis or workload characterization. One of the most popular packages for graphing and gathering performance statistics is the Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) by Tobias Oetiker and Dave Rand.[78] Another popular route is the combination of the Gnuplot[79] and the NetPBM packages.[80]

The MTRG package is the better integrated and slicker of the two. MRTG is pretty much a “soup to nuts” system statistical graphing package. It will gather the stats, archive them, and generate the HTML for your system status web page and even draw the graphs for you.

If you’ve already got a mechanism to gather the statistics (or have one in mind), the Gnuplot/NetPBM package might be a good choice. Gnuplot is very flexible in drawing the graphs, and NetPBM is equally flexible at batch reformatting of the graphics.

[78] http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html

[79] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/gnuplot_info.html

[80] http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/packages/NetPBM/

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