When you need it
As a linux/unix system administrator you may be asked to generate some graphs about the common system metrics (ie : cpu, memory, disks access, and so on...), and immediately you start with a number of tool to get the metrics, collect data and "purge" the data 'cause of indentation, output formatting, unwanted information or numeric format, etc...
You may use the SAR daemon tool to collect all the interesting metrics of a host and use the SADF command to format them in CSV or XML, and then ? use
gnu graph ? or maybe
excel ? or
ksar ? Yes, you can, and automatically loose any ability to drilldown "interactively" on the data.
ORyou can import them in a quite more advanced tools such as QlikView or PowerBI, configuring
ONE and only
ONE interactive document with all the graph, metrics, filters, etc and only
refresh the values from the collected ones only when needed. This is the road i want to follow : one interactive document which allow me to filter for time, disks access times, luns or volume, process and memory.
You could follow this road configuring all the system-collection-tools as you wish or you can give SARBI a try, at least you will start with a basic
boilerplate to work on.
Guide
Samples
Use Cases