Trend: a general-purpose, efficient trend graph

trend is a general-purpose, efficient trend graph for “live” data. Data is read in ASCII form from a file or continuously from a FIFO and displayed in real-time into a multi-pass trend (much like a CRT oscilloscope). trend can be used as a rapid analysis tool for progressive or time-based data series together with trivial scripting.

Features and requirements

Features:

  • OpenGL graphics
  • Automatic or fixed graph scaling
  • Two graph scrolling, shading and filling modes
  • Configurable colours/grid
  • Flexible input
  • Interactivity

Requirements:

Building

Cd into the distribution’s “src” directory and execute “make”.

Compiler optimisations are left to the user. Set your standard compiler flags (CPPFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/LDFLAGS) before building.

Copy the resulting “src/trend” executable and trend’s manual “trend.1” where appropriate.

trend should work on any POSIX/OpenGL capable system.

Usage examples

Some simple example scripts are included in the package. Within the “examples” directory you can find:

./mem <seconds>:

Print-out active memory (incl. swap) of a linux kernel using /proc/meminfo using Perl each tenth of second or the specified number of seconds.

./imem <seconds>:

The same using pmval from Peformance Co-Pilot.

./net <seconds> [if]:

Show network usage (in and out) in bytes using /proc/net/dev using Perl (the default network interface if you don’t specify any is eth0).

./tstimes:

A more complicated example I use to display server production times without particular requirements (the log is parsed and displayed in realtime).

./timeq [-s] <seconds>:

Time-quantize ASCII input: show an average (or total with -s) for received values (from stdin) in the specified time-lapse. A common example of usage would be in conjunction with the preceding “tstimes”, or see the following example with apache. Note that timeq outputs binary values to avoid double-parses (see/use -fd on the command line). The ASCII parser is not as flexible as trend’s and requires each value to be in a separated line. Do not use this sample implementation for any serious work.

In the following example we will display the latest two minutes of network activity (with the first one being in front of the other) sampled each tenth of second:

./examples/net 0.1 | trend -c2a -Lin,out - 1200 600

To display the number of current active processes over time you can do:

(while true; do ps -A | wc -l; sleep 1; done) | trend - ...

Bytes roughly transferred each minute on an apache server?:

tail -f access.log | \
  sed -une 's/.* \([0-9][0-9]*\) [0-9]*$/\1/p' | \
  ./examples/timeq -s 60 | trend -fd -d - 60x24

An example of using snmpdelta from the NET-SNMP utilities to monitor a remote IF-MIB network interface:

snmpdelta -v1 -CT -c public router ifInOctets.1 | trend - ...

Alternatively, many (if not all) of the contributed MRTG scripts are a valuable resource to system administrators in particular.

Accurate timing

trend was designed with accuracy and speed in mind (I use it literally as a virtual oscilloscope). For this reasons trend offloads to the caller both the timing and sampling responsibility, allowing trend to be used for any purpose with maximum precision.

For the non-experts, the scripting convention of sleeping a fixed amount of time after sampling the value will lead to cumulative timing errors. ASCII input by itself adds a variable delay, so use binary formats when performance and latency are a concern.

General/support mailing list

If you feel to discuss improvements and suggestions, and/or test beta releases before announcement you can subscribe to trend-users by either sending an empty email to <trend-users+subscribe@thregr.org>, using GMane (group “gmane.comp.graphics.trend.general”) or by contacting the author at <wavexx@thregr.org>. The archives are accessible via web through https://www.mail-archive.com/trend-users@thregr.org/ or via news directly.

Troubleshooting

trend crashes on start with SIGBUS/SIGSEGV:

This problem experienced on some machines is caused by the new joystick support present in FreeGLUT 2.2.0. Either use standard GLUT, or upgrade to a later/cvs version of FreeGLUT (nightly snapshots are fine), where joystick initialisation has been made conditional.

Screen-shots

Due to popular demand, here’s how the screen-shots as found in https://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/ were generated:

trend-and-ion:

Several instances of trend running under the ION window manager. Data source: /proc/ and mrtg-utils.

trend-distrib:

trend with the distribution graph active, showing a sine, tangent, random-incremental and random function.

trend-intr:

trend -d fifo 1200 600, with the interactive examiners active. Input is from a custom board.

trend-oversample:

trend -S -I 0x00FF00 fifo 10000x3 on a ~700 pixels wide window (implicit 1x14 oversampling), showing buffer and visual latency in respect to the source (taken before the actual release).

trend-qtac:

Multiple instances of trend running as a server room monitoring system. Courtesy of Liam MacKenzie and qtac.edu.au

Further customisation and development

Almost all internal aspects and defaults of trend can be changed by modifying “defaults.hh” and recompiling. If you feel that a default should be changed or an internal constant be exposed contact me to make the change customizable instead.

trend’s GIT repository is publicly accessible at:

https://gitlab.com/wavexx/trend

or at git://src.thregr.org/trend