On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Erik Cederstrand wrote:

quoted text
>> One way to do this would be a matrix of each metric with its change 
>> compared to recent samples.  e.g. you could do a student's T comparison of 
>> today's numbers with those from yesterday, or from a week ago, and 
>> colour-code those that show a significant deviation from "no change". This 
>> might be a bit noisy on short timescales, so you could aggregrate data into 
>> larger bins and compare e.g. moving 1-week aggregates. Fluctuations on 
>> short timescales won't stand out, but if there is a real change then it 
>> will show up less than a week later.
>
> I agree that there's a need for an overview and some sort of notification. 
> I've been collecting historical data to get a baseline for the statistics 
> and I'll try to see what I can do over the next weeks.

A thumbnail page of graphs would be quite neat also. :-)

quoted text
>> These significant events could also be graphed themselves and/or a history 
>> log maintained (or automatically annotated on the individual graphs) so 
>> historical changes can also be pinpointed.
>> 
>> At some point the ability to annotate the data will become important (e.g. 
>> "We understand the cause of this, it was r1.123 of foo.c, which was 
>> corrected in r1.124.  The developer responsible has been shot.")
>
> There's a field in the database for this sort of thing. I just think it 
> needs some sort of authentication. That'll have to wait a bit.

Sounds great -- it would be nice to be able to have a few annotations such as 
"RELENG_7 branchpoint", "7.0 release", that could then appear as vertical 
lines in the graphs, and likewise things like "netisr made default", "libthr 
becomes default".

Finally, in the interests of making your life more complicated, it would be 
neat to graph performance across a set of FreeBSD branches overlaid or 
vertically offset so you could monitor, say, MySQL performance on 8-CURRENT, 
7-STABLE, and 6-STABLE over time.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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