[Orca-users] Re: Idea

[simon.klyne at arcordia.com]

Blair

I think that the idea of a plot group to order the plots is good.
I would like to see it extended to to allow Orca to generate a hierachy of
web pages,
possibly by including an optional page option within 'group' and 'plot'
configuration
parameters.

eg.
The requirement I had last year for monitoring multiple systems included:
 - output from orcallator to show system utilisation
 - sybase engine utilisation
 - sybase engine use by user
 - sybase replication latency
 - sybase response time
 - sybase database sizes
 - process resource consumption for long running processes on a per user
basis
 - message queue length and queue time for components of our application
 - user interaction response times

The data from each of these had different granularities ranging from 5
minutes (orcallator.se),
10 minutes (sybase engine) through to 1 day for database sizes.

In the end we came up with a hierachy of pages
 1 - top level just a set of links to pages for 'System', 'Sybase',
'Messaging', 'Processes', 'Response Times'.
 2 - second level pages then link to pages generated by Orca
 3 - each third level page generated by Orca from a separate instance of
Orca.

Each Orca config file includes links between the hierachies using the
'html_page_header'


Another enhancement I would like to see is a CGI interface so that the
graphs are generated on demand
and we can then run Orca with the '-R' option.
This would greatly reduce the load on the machine at the cost of slower
resonse time.
The above configuration could easily generate a load of 12+ on an 8 CPU
E4000.
I even graphed the CPU and memory usage or Orca at one stage and found it
was using about 95% of the
CPU, even when running 'nice -19'


Simon






Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com> on 14/10/2001 21:18:50

Please respond to orca-users at yahoogroups.com

To:   orca-users at yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject:  Re: [orca-users] Idea


Phillip,

The ordering really depends upon what people think is important.  I
designed
Orca at GeoCities and serving web traffic was the most important thing,
hence
HTTP plots appear first.

Probably the best thing would be to let people easily reorder the plots
themselves.

One idea is to have each plot could be part of a "plot group" and at the
top
of the Orca configuration file could be a sorted list of "plot groups".
This
would easily let people order their plots, such as in the order you give.

This would also allow plots to grouped into sections and let users more
easily find the plot they need.

Any other approaches on ow else could this be done?

Blair

"Phillip B. Bruce" wrote:
>
> Blair,
>
>     I've come up with idea and wanted to pass my thoughts on the group.
>
>     While Orca is neat and finally working after the hard work that you
> and Alan put in to fix
>     my problem. I was looking at the output. I felt that it could be
> organize a little different. Not
>     that this is ok but would make sense to users needing to see only
> certain things.
>
>     Let me give an example:
>
>     System
>     Network
>     Services
>     Databases
>    Application
>
>    The above would be main one. Then they would break out like so:
>
>     System -  Cpu, Memory,  Swap,  Disk Space
>     Network - Interfaces, TCP
>     Services -  NFS,  Web Servers,
>     Databases - filesystem, tablespaces, transactions
>     Application - ERP, CRM's  ( Thinking about this one)
>
>     The idea is that it would break out the sections into meaningful
> ones that can be
>      quickly address instead of having to look and do the hunt.
> Althought it isn't that hard
>      but I was thinking along the lines of making things even easier to
> find.
>
>      Any thoughts to this.
>