Visualising pSeries temperature data

[sawyl]

I've yet another frantically busy week, with my time split between my own work and acting as consulting unix guru to others. Of my own projects, the most interesting has involved an attempt to monitor the temperatures of the p575s in real time. The actual data capture isn't too complicated and simply involves logging into each HMC in turn and:

1. running lssycfg to obtain a list of the managed frames;
2. running lshwinfo against each frame to obtain the temperatures of each node in the frame.

The data from lshwinfo can then be massaged into an appropriate form and dumped out to a file for further analysis.

I decided to use the excellent LiveGraph utility to visualise the data in real time. LiveGraph accepts data in a pseudo-CSV form — something that makes it trivial to import the data into Excel for post-processing and analysis — and displays the results in a constantly updating chart window that can be configured to show either the entire data file or just the tail data.

My only minor quibble with it as a tool is that it doesn't seem to be possible to open a particular data source from the command line — something that matters to me because I want to package the whole thing up so that it can be launched with a single command that frees the end user from having to know anything about the underlying data source. Perhaps, if I have time next week, I'll investigate the API in more detail to see if I can't use that to solve the problem.