Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
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.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 8 May 2002 aw
Conference Index
USENIX home