JKstat 0.44

It's been one day off work after another here in the UK recently. In between going to a beer festival and Newmarket races, I've found a little time to work on JKstat.

The result is a new version of JKstat available for download.

There's nothing earth shattering here, but a process of steady improvement. I've gone through the demos, removing some of the cruftier ones, enhancing some of the others, and moving some of those from SolView back to JKstat. So, the original iostat demo has gone, leaving just the table-based version; the load subcommand has been replaced by an uptime subcommand. The cpustate demo has been merged with the cpuchart demo, and has also had a vertical mode added.


OK, so it's not that impressive on my little desktop machine, but it works much better than the old layout as a display arrangement on something like a T5140 that has 128 cpus in it.

There's additional polish elsewhere. Apart from fewer typos, I've filtered out kstats from the chartbuilder that you'll never want to chart, so there are fewer kstats to munge through. The charts work a little better too: they now display the statistics in the requested order, and you can set the colors.

Another thing I've been playing with is an 'interesting' subcommand that tries to identify kstats with interesting behaviour - as in doing something out of the ordinary. This worked out a whole lot worse than I hoped. The problem, of course, is defining what constitutes normal (let alone anomalous) behaviour. The behaviour of any kstat certainly isn't normally distributed, and in fact many are very spiky as a matter of course. I may revisit this with KAR, which has historical data from which I can construct a baseline of the expected range of behaviour.

Something else I've been looking at is sparklines. I added a simple line graph to JStripChart to support this. At the moment they're not really sparklines, just little graphs, but it's a start, and expect to see more of that in SolView.

There's also a stunningly boneheaded bug fixed in KstatFilter. Filtering out things you don't want was matching far too much (it would match any of a module:instance:name specifier rather than the correct behaviour of matching all of them, so unix:0:kstat_types would throw away all unix kstats and all of instance 0, which wasn't what you wanted).