Sunday, September 13, 2009

JKstat - interactive chart builder

In the latest update to JKstat I've introduced a new piece of functionality I've been wanting to get done for a while.

JKstat is pretty good at producing charts, but - until now - you've either had to take what it gives you or delve into the code. No longer. As of version 0.30, if you

./jkstat chartbuilder
you'll get a window just like this:


A kstat can be selected from the tree; you can then choose the statistic or statistics of interest, and then get a chart of either the rates of change or the values of the chosen statistic(s).

You can also choose whether to produce a line chart of the various statistics, or a stacked chart, with statistics in solid color stacked atop each other.

You can then choose whether to just show this individual instance of a kstat, or to show all the available instances (so you can, for example, produce a chart showing all the disks or all the cpus, just by picking one).

And you can decide whether to show the individual kstats, or whether to show an aggregate over all the kstats.

So, the following chart is generated by selecting cpu:0:sys from the tree, checking all instances, and asking for an aggregated, stacked chart of the cpu_nsec_idle, cpu_nsec_user, and cpu_nsec_kernel statistics, showing the relative proportions of user, system, and idle time on my system.



(If you're interested, the spike of user activity at about 21:19 is a build running; the huge splodge of kernel time just after 21:27 is VirtualBox starting up a VM.)

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