[Orca-users] Multiple disk space percentage graphs

[David Michaels]

Tonij T. wrote:
> Thanks for the information, Dragon .  I realized that when I replied I 
> didnt CC: the mailing list, and since the point of mailing lists is to 
> share information I thought I would update everyone on this.

Ah, and so it was.  Some of your questions I already answered in the 
private thread, but I'll reiterate:

> For some reason, no matter what changes I make to this file, the 
> graphs never change.  Not sure what is going on there

Possibly your orca start script is using a different orcallator.cfg file 
than what you're editing.  Check the scripts, and see what it's using.  
My script is pretty explicit:
orca -daemon -logfile $ORCAHOME/${hostname}-orca.out 
/npd/dmichael/orca-522/etc/orcallator.cfg &

> Since my main goal here is to isolate specific file systems, why not 
> go right to the source?  Since Orca  is using RRD to collect disk 
> space metrics I decided to learn how it is being stored and how Orca 
> is pulling that data out.  What started out as a daunting task has 
> actually yielded some decent results.  I am able to create manual 
> graphs of specifc file systems on the fly now.  Cool! I love RRD, its 
> an awesome tool.

You may be interested in drraw then, which is basically a web front-end 
to your rrdtool command:
http://web.taranis.org/drraw/

But it sounds like if you can get Orca to at least present you the 
filesystems in a format you're most often going to need, then you'd 
rarely need to go out of your way to generate specific files for 
review.  This should be a simple matter of modifying the corresponding 
plot {} entry(ies), and stopping/restarting Orca.

As you mention below, you're using 0.27.  While this was a good release 
at the time, there have been many improvements made since.  r525 is the 
latest 'r'elease, and in it you'll find references to 0.28.  0.28 and 
beyond were evidently not considered good enough to be stable releases, 
but it's my experience that they're superior to 0.27 in every 
conceivable way.

We've discussed definitions for a 1.0 release in the recent past on this 
list - not sure what the status is on that, at present.

> Now, what would be a BIG help, is if I could see just how Orca is 
> generating these graphs.  The nuts and bolts of the .png creation, I 
> guess.  I have the basics down, i.e. I can create a graph with a given 
> start time and end time using the counter for the given filesystem.   
> What I am a bit baffled on is how Orca is also showing me averages, 
> min and max values.  I have been trying to get that into my custom 
> graphs but have not had any luck.

I believe Orca is instructing RRD to compute the averages and other 
stats as it generates the files.  I'm not sure of the exact commands 
Orca passes to RRD, either, but the drraw tool mentioned above, which 
uses RRD files only, is able to generate this information.  So I 
conclude that RRD must be capable of doing that part independent of Orca.

> Oh and another question:  I am using Orca version 027.  I dont see a 
> later version anywhere but I did find something called 
> "orca-snapshot-r525".  Is that an update?  Its all rather confusing to 
> me, I would expect a newer version to be 028 or 030 or something...

See above.

Cheers,
--Dragon