USENIX Tenth System Administration Conference (LISA
'96)
Visualizing Huge Tracefiles with Xscal
Alva L. Couch
Tufts University
Abstract
Xscal is a tool for visualizing the behavior of large numbers
of comparable entities such as computers, routers, processes,
users, etc. The input to Xscal is a table of numbers and strings,
which can represent a system snapshot at an instant of time or an
event trace of system activity over time. Xscal depicts the global
distribution of values in one or two columns of that data. The
user can then annotate the visualization to denote categories of
behavior, after which Xscal can depict detailed information on
entities in each category. Originally developed to study massively
parallel computation, Xscal is applicable to a wide variety of
system analysis tasks, from visualizing the process table or
accounting statistics for a large server to studying the
performance of a large network.
View the full text of this paper in
ASCII (35,568 Bytes) and
POSTSCRIPT (2,555,421 Bytes) form.
To Become a USENIX Member, please see our
Membership Information.
|