[plug] [OT] Data/Trend 'plotting'

[Carl Gherardi]

*mutters*

Sorry about getting this twice Matthew.

On Apr 7, 2005 4:20 PM, Matthew Lambie <mlambie at thefrontiergroup.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 15:57 +0800, Carl Gherardi wrote:
> > On Apr 7, 2005 10:58 AM, Timothy White <weirdo at tigris.org> wrote:
> > > I am looking at doing to trend observations for some emails I have.
> > > Basically I want to have multiple plots based on date and time of the
> > > emails.
> > > So:
> > >
> > >     * Received time (averaged over days, weeks, months...)
> > >     * Total number received (day, week, month)
> > >     * ... And different trend graphs to give me some stats to work on
> > >       and stuff
> > >
> > <snip>
> > > Thanks
> > >
> > > Tim
> > > p.s. I know that someone knows how to do this cause I've seen usage
> > > graphs and stuff before like it.
> >
> > rrdtool is what you want. Cacti, mrtg and nagios are also good tools
> > for continuous monitoring, cacti use rrdtool as a backend, and mrtg
> > can be configured to do so. Never used nagios, so i'll let others
> > comment.
>
> rrdtool uses a round-robin database,

hehe.. Stands for round-robin-database tool, and cacti is the best
front end i've found for it so far.

> which I believe expects data at a
> consistent interval. This is great for things like monitoring network
> load every 5 minutes and displaying a pretty graph, but if the data
> isn't being pumped in at a standard rate, it's not the best backend.
>

Fair point - I just reread his reqs - if he wants all of those things
for history then cacti/rrdtool are a good option.

If (as it looks like he does) want it for a one off report i'd suggest
any spreadsheet app, gnumeric will do that pretty well, though the
data will need some massaging.

Next something like gnuplot followed by octave or matplotlib, but the
needs look very much tailored to a spreadsheet.

Carl G