plotscope

A summer 2011 Cloud Foundry Fling

ishafer (mrcaps@gmail.com)

Installation

plotscope requires node.js and MongoDB. You can vmc push to Cloud Foundry (e.g. a micro cloud running on your machine) or run on your machine. Here's how to grab the dependencies for local use, as of 9/8/11.

MongoDB

Generally, the downloads page is helpful.

If you're on Debian or Ubuntu, I'd recommend using packages from the apt repos

After the package is installed, mongod should start automatically. If it doesn't, run mongod; the db shell is accessible as mongo for testing.

node.js

The installation page is helpful here. Beware that node is very in-flux, and building from a bleeding-edge version will probably cause sadness. Plotscope has been tested on v0.10.12.

Build/Run

Just do a

node app.js

from this directory and the app should fire up on http://localhost:3000

Adding Data

To add data, go to the upload page:

http://localhost:3000/db/add/<name>/<scale>

where <name> is the name of the dataset you'd like to add and <scale> is a scaling value for the data. The axes are currently hardcoded to have a maximum of YMAX = 1000000; thus, if you have data between 0 and 1000, <scale>=1000 is a good choice. The original data values/range will still be maintained, and the UI shows the actual scale on multiple axes to the left of the plot.

One of the tiny sample data sets is in etc/data/stock-vmw.bin for testing this.

Aggregation

After uploading, to build aggregates, go to

http://localhost:3000/db/agg/<name>

where <name> was the name used for the upload. This creates the scaled views necessary for the UI.

Data Format

Data is in a simple binary format of 8 byte datapoints: 4 byte timestamps and 4 byte values (little-endian) with no header. Datafiles should look like

[time0][data0][time1][data1][time2][data2]...

Some data sources of note:

• A little synthetic data creator is in etc/synth
• To convert from the format stored by the SS machines at the PDL, etc/data/ssmachine.py cleans them up and will spit out binary
• To convert from CSV or delimited format, there's etc/data/csv.py

Contact

Surely there are bugs in both what's written above and in the app! Contact mrcaps@gmail.com if/when "stuff breaks" :)