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Web-Based Plotting of STATSPACK Data

Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

There are several freeware and shareware tools available on the Internet to perform graphical plotting of STATSPACK data, but we will focus on the most popular tools in this section.

The RRDtool Product

The most popular web graphing tool is the RRDtool product, which was formerly the graphing and logging component of the MRTG product. It is a GPLed free software product written by the famous Swiss computer scientist Tobi Oetiker.

RRD is the acronym for the round robin database. The RRD system is designed to store and display any form of time-series data such as server, network, and STATSPACK metrics. Extracts can be written to load RRD with STATSPACK data from the Oracle database and the data can then be used to generate trend analysis graphs in GIF format.

The RRDtool product can be downloaded from the following web site:

http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/

RRDtool is very flexible, and is generally used by large Oracle sites to display Oracle, server, and network performance data in web pages. At the simplest level, RRDtool accepts data sets and creates GIF files that can then be embedded into HTML pages. Figure 15-13 shows an example of a GIF file generated by RRDtool.

Figure 15-126: An example GIF file created by RRDtool

Please insert figure 15-13 from 007213378-3

Other Web-Based Graphing Tools

There are dozens of interactive web sites that can be used to generate a plot of STATSPACK data. As a representative sample, let's look at the facility offered at the University of New South Wales in Sidney, Australia. Here is a link to their interactive data plotting Web site:

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/3rdyearlab/graphing/graph.html

This web site accepts data points and creates the appropriate graph based upon your inputs. In the following example, we paste in our STATSPACK data for average CPU usage by hour of the day. As shown in Figure 15-14, we choose a Gaussian fit technique that gives a smooth curve for the average CPU usage.

Figure 15-127: An example of an Internet-based plotting utility

Next we see the plot for the data (see Figure 15-15). This is presented as a GIF image (General Interchange Format) within the web page.

Figure 15-128: A web-based plot of average CPU percentage

To capture this GIF file for inclusion in an HTML page or a Microsoft Word document, you can simply right-click the image and save it to a local file on your PC (see Figure 15-16).

Figure 15-129: Capturing a web image to a PC file

To summarize, there are a wealth of graphics tools that can be used to plot STATSPACK data and present it in meaningful formats. Regardless of the method you choose, presenting long-term trends with STATSPACK can provide management with critical strategic planning information.

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