Network Flow Analysis

Automating Graph Production

Although you'll always need to have some ad hoc reporting ability, you'll find that you need certain graphs over and over again. You should make producing these graphs so easy that one of your flunkies can do it, or you can even schedule graph production with cron. The best way to manage this is through scripting and automation. gnuplot is very scripting-friendly, and the following script processes yesterday's flow files to generate a bidirectional traffic graph.

Note

This script is not optimized. In a real environment, you'd send email via Perl, but I don't want to waste a page on that example when you probably already have a standard way to send mail on your systems. Too, this script uses insecure temp files, and you ...