Graphs help tell a war story

2012-07-01 by Philip Durbin

The leap second bug of 2012 got me thinking about how much I love the idea behind http://www.flickr.com/groups/webopsviz

From their FAQ:

Q: What is this?

A: This group is for sharing visualizations of web operations metrics. For the most part, this means graphs of systems and application metrics, from software like ganglia, cacti, hyperic, etc.

Q: What’s interesting to post here?

A: Spikes, dips, patterns. Things with colors. Shiny things. Donuts. Ponies.

This graphic could easily be posted there, which shows the effect of the 2012 leap second bug on XenCenter, according to https://twitter.com/ptinsley/status/219255127838703616 and follow up posts.

Initially, I was thinking he should post it on that WebOps Visualizations page on Flickr. Then I thought about how I myself don’t have access to post there. (And besides, isn’t Flickr dying or something?) Some months ago when I wanted to wanted to share a graph I’d saved from Ganglia, I posted it to https://github.com/crimsonfu/crimsonfu.github.com/blob/master/images/rcss4-network_report-last-2hr-1333475820.png (and the raw data to https://github.com/crimsonfu/crimsonfu.github.com/blob/master/images/rcss4-network_report-last-2hr-1333475820.json ) so I could link to it, but I’m not sure I want to keep junking up the crimsonfu website repo with this stuff. (If you’re curious what that graph was about, see http://blog.mattynick.com/blog/2012/04/03/rsync-vs-tar/ )

I’m pretty into the idea of dedicated places on the Internet for sharing very specific stuff, such as http://www.cakewrecks.com or http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com . I could easily imagine a blog or even a git repo along the same lines as the WebOps Visualizations Flickr group, which is sadly inactive.

If you know a dedicated place to share awesome graphs from computing war stories, please let us know by popping in #crimsonfu on Freenode.