Solaris + Tcl + Apache + RRDtool, Part 2

In Part 1, I described how I made use of Solaris (zones), Tcl, Apache and RRDtool to provide a generic web frontend in plotting time-based data. However, the input data has to be in RRDtool data input format, where the time stamp has to be in epoch and data has to be colon separated.

In order to make this web frontend to be more usable, I made a number of enhancement:

• Allow both timestamp to be either in epoch or ISO 8601 format
• Graph type to be either LINE or AREA (STACK)
• User supplied field separator

Below images show the web form and the graph:

In fact, it is pretty easy to get the current epoch time:
perl -e 'print time()'.
Just embedded the above in your monitoring script.