Sar/Visualize CPU data

This is a five minute guide how to visualize Linux's sar data provided by the sysstat utility without a lot of mangeling the data.

Goal

Create CPU graphs in R from the sar utility without massaging the output data too much.

Prerequisites

• The Linux sysstat package installed and configured to report performance data.
• R
• ggplot2 R library

Howto

Dumping the sar data with sadf

The data sar collects is in binary format and needs to be converted first to a format that can be imported into R. This is done with the sadf command which converts the collected data into tabular data delimited by semicolon.

sadf -t -d -P ALL <sar-file> > <output>

Importing the data into R

The next step is to read the tabular data into R and print the graphs there are just a handful of commands to do this. In R type the following commands.

library( ggplot2 )
cpu.data <- read.csv( file="<sadf-output>", sep=";" )
cpu.data$timestamp <- as.POSIXct( cpu.data$timestamp )
cpu.data$CPU[ cpu.data$CPU == "-1" ] <- "all"
ggplot( data=cpu.data, aes( x=timestamp, y=user, group=CPU, colour=CPU ) ) + geom_line()