Perl Script To Graph Sar Cached Disk Reads and Writes

Note: Click the above picture to see it at 800x600.

Hey again,

For today's post, we're finally finishing up our four part series on graphing out sar in real time, that we last looked at yesterday. Today we'll be scripting out cached disk reads and writes on a server. This script goes in a little bit of a different direction than the previous three, as we're finally going to go hog-nuts and use bars and lines at the same time (not for the faint of heart ;)

This script was tested on Solaris, and the output from "sar -b" on RedHat is laid out in different order (so the array elements I use to plot the Graph values in this script may not give you the results you desire if you just run it straight-up in Linux). The script below is, again, written in Perl and will, run on Solaris Unix and RedHat Linux (Linux, again, with slight modification)

In our next post, we'll look at the modifications necessary to make all 4 of these scripts work on RedHat Linux. We'll also look at the basic concepts and what we're actually looking for, just in case the next version of the sysstat RPM changes the order of output again!

This script should be run on the host that you're doing the measuring on (since it runs sar at the time you invoke it), like so:

./sarcachegraph.pl

This graph is probably the most annoying out of the 4, which is why I saved it for last. Having cached reads at 100% is pretty much normal on Solaris, so I chose red to make it stand out even more than it would normally. My hope is that none of my superiors will want to look at this ever, and, if they do, they'll never want to again ;)

Remember, click on the picture above to see it at its actual resolution :)

Cheers,





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

#!/usr/bin/perl

#
# Sarcachegraph.pl
#
# Graph Cached Disk Reads and Writes
#
# 2008 - Mike Golvach - eggi@comcast.net
#
# <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>
#

use GIFgraph::mixed;
open(SARB, "/usr/sbin/sar -b|");
@sarb = <SARB>;
close(SARB);
$my_graph = new GIFgraph::mixed(800,600);
$my_graph->set( 
 x_label => 'Time',
 y1_label => 'Percentage',
 y2_label => 'Percentage',
 title => 'Cache Reads and Writes by Server - host',
 two_axes => 1,
 y1_max_value => 100,
 y2_max_value => 100,
 y_min_value => 0,
 y_tick_number => 5,
 long_ticks => 1,
 x_ticks => 0,
 legend_marker_width => 24,
 line_width => 10,
 bar_spacing => 0,
 gifx => 800,
 gify => 600,
 transparent => 1,
 dclrs => [ qw( red green blue ) ],
 types => [ qw( bars lines ) ],
);
$my_graph->set_legend( qw( Cache_Reads Cache_Writes ) );
$a = $b = $c = 0;
foreach $line (@sarb) {
 next if ( ($line !~ /:/) || ($line =~ /\//));
 @line=split(" ", $line);
 if ( ( $a % 12 ) != 0 ) {
  $pandata0[$a] = undef;
 } else {
  $line[0] =~ s/:00$//;
  $pandata0[$a] = $line[0];
 }
 $pandata1[$b] = $line[3];
 $pandata2[$c] = $line[6];
 $a++;
 $b++;
 $c++;
}
if ( ! $c ) {
 @pandata0[0] = `date "+%H:%M"`;
 @pandata1[1] = 0;
 @pandata2[2] = 0;
}
@data = (\@pandata0, \@pandata1, \@pandata2);
$my_graph->plot_to_gif( "/your/data/dir/sarb.gif", \@data );

, Mike

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