[Orca-users] Help a newbie out

[Brian F.]

> > "Brian F." wrote:
> >
> > I've only just downloaded and gotten everything installed on a Solaris8
(SPARC) server.
> > I was attracted to Orca after seeing the wide array of information
graphed on sites around the net.
> > I'm just not getting how to create a config file to graph the one thing
i'm looking to graph.
> > What i have is daily logs from mail servers in the following format.
> >
> > MSGLOADHR        00         23004
> > MSGLOADHR        01         50364
> > MSGLOADHR        02         45444
> > MSGLOADHR        03         48593
> > MSGLOADHR        04         50701
> > MSGLOADHR        05         43412
> > MSGLOADHR        06         46165
> > MSGLOADHR        07         45057
> > MSGLOADHR        08         37828
> > MSGLOADHR        09         48084
> > MSGLOADHR        10         56722
> > MSGLOADHR        11         64746
> > MSGLOADHR        12         65716
> > MSGLOADHR        13         56757
> > MSGLOADHR        14         64573
> > MSGLOADHR        15         60849
> > MSGLOADHR        16         64900
> > MSGLOADHR        17         65575
> > MSGLOADHR        18         70603
> > MSGLOADHR        19         69434
> > MSGLOADHR        20         59328
> > MSGLOADHR        21         63066
> > MSGLOADHR        22         55981
> > MSGLOADHR        23         54380
> >
> > That's the amount of messages processed per hour per 24 hours.
> > How do you go about getting orca to parse the log files everyday for
> > the above data, and plot this into a graph for my webserver to display?
> > Does someone have a sample config that does roughly the same thing?
>
> I don't have a config file that does this, but you'll need to the Unix
> timestamp in seconds since 1970 as one of the columns in there and use
> that.
>
> Do you generate this file all at once for a day or does it get
> appended to for each measurement?  If the later, then you can do
> something like
>
> group GROUP_NAME1 {
>          find_files            filename1 filename2 ...
>          column_description    column1_name column2_name ...
>          date_source           file_mtime
>          interval              3600
>          .
>          .
>          .
>          }
>
> where the file_mtime is the important part.
>
> You'll also want to make your measurements at the top of the
> hour otherwise RRDtool will interpolate your data to fit at
> the top of every hour.
>
> Best,
> Blair
>
> -- 
> Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com>
> Plots of your system's performance - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/
>

The data is written at the end of the day, actually the file is output from
a script that parses the actual logfile after the daily rotation. Since
these log files are up to ~10gigs, it sometimes takes several hours to
process them and output the data.Making the time issue a sticky problem. All
the logs from 35 servers are sent off to the central logging server at
midnight, and the central server parses the info. This sometimes takes up to
14 hours to process them all. So usually by about 2PM the next day, all of
the logs are prepared. The problem i seem to have is telling orca or rrdtool
to populate the data after the logs are parsed for 24 hour period ending at
midnight the previous night. Is there a way to force it to not read time in
a standard format, just assume that i'm giving it the information for 24
hours in 1 hour intervals?
Do you have a generic config file that i can spend some time with that does
some common simple task?

Thanks for the help!!

Brian