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Ideas for charting a lot of information without making it look messy

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    Ideas for charting a lot of information without making it look messy

    Hi all,

    I am gathering a lot of information from many servers and I want to create charts that will easily show what goes wrong and when.
    Here is the information I can have access to :
    - CPU usage in percentage, measured every 30 seconds
    - Number of logged on users, measured every 30 seconds
    - Per process CPU usage (top 5 averages for the day), measured every 10 seconds
    - Per process CPU usage (top 5 consumption peaks for the day), measured every 10 seconds
    - Memory usage in percentage, measured every 10 seconds
    - Network usage in bytes / second, measured every 10 seconds
    - Disk usage in bytes / second, measured every 10 seconds
    - CPU usage in percentage, measured every second
    Naturally, data measured every 10 seconds can also be computed for 30 secs if needed

    Right now, I create graphs that show CPU usage and logged on users, plus historic averages and data from the day before :
    Excel-chart-ex1.jpg

    But since I just added tons of extra info, I need to rethink this.
    I want to be able to see if there is a big change in the pattern at first glance and once a problem is detected, to easily see what is wrong (for example, detect a high CPU usage, which would lead to check the top processes, to maybe realize disk usage is going too high...)

    So I thought about combining data on some more graphs (I would probably keep the existing ones).
    One thing I thought of would be to use an area graph showing RAM usage as background for a line graph showing CPU, Network, and Disk usage. I would use the same method for top processes.
    But this seems quite hard for 2 reasons :
    1. I can't find a way to mix area and line charts
    2. I am stuck with only 2 Y axises :D The numbers being on very different scales, some results would be barely visible.

    Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks.

  2. #2
    Forum Guru Andy Pope's Avatar
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    Re: Ideas for charting a lot of information without making it look messy

    have a look at panel charts
    http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsH...nelChart1.html
    Cheers
    Andy
    www.andypope.info

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    Re: Ideas for charting a lot of information without making it look messy

    Thanks Andy for the suggestion. But from what I understand about panel charts, it consists of creating several charts to set them up close together.
    I have data measured twice per minute for a whole day. Those graphs necessarily use up the whole width of the screen if we want to see enough details.
    Moreover, since this would be used for diagnostic purposes, it's important that we can easily see that, for example, a peak in overall CPU at, say, 11:34, happens exactly at the same time as a peak in memory or disk usage, or, on the contrary, only a few seconds later. Or whatever else.
    This requires data to be shown on the same charts.

  4. #4
    Forum Guru Andy Pope's Avatar
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    Re: Ideas for charting a lot of information without making it look messy

    If you use the vertically stacked panels then they need not take up all the width.

    you could use named ranges to control the amount of data displayed on the x-axis. so zoom in and scroll time periods

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