[Haskell-cafe] ANN: timeplot-0.3.0 - the analyst's swiss army knife for visualizing ad-hoc log files

[Eugene Kirpichov]

 Hello fellow haskellers,

I announce the release of timeplot-0.3.0, the "analyst's swiss army
knife for visualizing ad-hoc log files".

Links:
 * http://jkff.info/presentation/two-visualization-tools - a
presentation saying what the tools are all about and giving plenty of
graphical examples on cluster computing use cases. At the end of the
presentation there's also a couple of slides about installation. It is
a little bit outdated, it corresponds to versions just before 0.3.0.
 * http://hackage.haskell.org/package/timeplot
 * http://github.com/jkff/timeplot
 * The sibling tool, splot - for visualizing the activity of many
concurrent processes - http://hackage.haskell.org/package/splot and
http://github.com/jkff/splot . It has also gotten a couple of new
features since my last announcement.

The major new feature of tplot is the introduction of subplots, the
<<'within' plots>>.
It allows one to plot data from several sub-tracks on one track of the graph:
 - several line- or dot-plots
 - several plots of sums or cumulative sums, perhaps stacked (to see
how the sub-tracks contribute to the total sum - e.g. if your log
speaks about different types of overhead and you wish to see how they
contribute to the total)
 - stacked "activity count" plot - a generalization of the previous
"activity count" plot, which allows you to, given a log saying like
"Machine started servicing job JOB1 ... Machine finished servicing job
JOB1" etc, plot how many machines are servicing each job at any
moment, in a stacked fashion - so, how loads by different jobs
contribute to the whole cluster's load. The "activity frequency" plot
plots the same on a relative scale.

The syntax is, for example: "within[.] dots" or "within[.] acount" or
even "within[.] duration cumsum stacked" etc.

Note that these are of course just example use cases and the tool is
universal, it is not in any sense specialized to clusters, jobs,
overheads or actually even to logs.
I'd like to encourage you to give it a try and look around for a use case :)

If you do give the tool a try, please tell me if something goes wrong,
be it an installation problem or a bug (the version is fresh released,
so this is quite possible).

-- 
Eugene Kirpichov
Principal Engineer, Mirantis Inc. http://www.mirantis.com/
Editor, http://fprog.ru/