[Orca-users] Re: Is ORCA/RRD the right tool?

[Blair Zajac]

pcorchary wrote:
> 
> Requirement is to plot against time readings taken MANUALLY at
> differing times. (Approximately 2x/day - eventually there will be
> remote data capture via SNMP - in about 2-4 months).
> 
> I am currently capturing data via CGI/Forms and saving to text files,
> but not (yet) even as delimited data.
> 
> I can reformat my data into delimited, and move forward that way.
> 
> I'm looking for a quick, eaasy way to plot this ... seems like maybe
> ORCA/RRD is good, but ... maybe not ... everything I see in RRD and
> ORCA looks like things need to be at very consistent, reliable time
> intervals but this isn't. Data (reformatted, might look like this).
> 
> Date                     temp1 temp2 amps1 amps2
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> 03/06/2002 01:05:00 GMT  68    72    15    14
> 03/06/2002 13:28:00 GMT  69    71    16    12
> 03/07/2002 01:49:00 GMT  71    75    17    16
> 03/07/2002 14:15:00 GMT  71    69    17    14
> 
> (there's more, but that's the idea ...)
> 
> Can I do this with Orca?

You can, but RRD does take data measured at uneven intervals and will
interpolate it to even intervals and then plot that.

So if that works for you, then Orca works great.

Can you set up a cron job to record the data at consistent intervals?  If
you can have a Perl script make the CGI requests, then that would work just
great.

Best,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com>
Web and OS performance plots - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/