I can has pretty graphs?

October 22, 2007 9:48 AM

What is a cool-looking realtime pluggable visualization program for Linux?

I'm on a team working on building a cluster, and we'd like some nice real-time visualization of CPU load, and other things. Right now we are using KDE's ksysguard which gives us nice bar graphs and plots CPU usage - but it won't let us monitor custom things, like, for example, the number of files in a specified directory.

We would like something that is realtime, which kinda rules out all the web-based tools, and something that allows us to easily modify it to monitor anything we want. Furthermore, we need it to be able to monitor remote hosts, like ksysguard does (it does it with a daemon, or over ssh).

posted by bkudria to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I like conky. You can get it to monitor pretty much anything.
posted by limon at 10:17 AM on October 22, 2007

limon: From what I can tell, conky can't monitor remote hosts - we need that.
posted by bkudria at 10:33 AM on October 22, 2007

I've been using Moodss/Moompss.

I do most of my development in Tcl, so extending it is easy for me. You can also use Perl and Python if you are more familiar with those languages ( although there is most likely already a module out there for whatever you might need to do ).
posted by zap rowsdower at 10:55 AM on October 22, 2007

zap rowsdower: This is actually for kinda-public display, so it needs to look good. Unfortunately, that kinda rules out Tk.
posted by bkudria at 7:51 PM on October 22, 2007

There was this the other day on Slashdot. It seems to cover most of your requirements -realtime, modifiable, remote- and it's open source. You might want to look at the video.
posted by Cobalt at 11:49 AM on October 23, 2007

Hmmm...the first link didn't take. I meant THIS!
posted by Cobalt at 11:50 AM on October 23, 2007

Aah, yes, glTail.rb. We looked at that, but it seems to be more of a toy, and we don't really have log files. We'd like to monitor CPU usage first, and then custom scriptable things next. Basically, bar graphs and plot graphs.
posted by bkudria at 12:13 PM on October 24, 2007