by Jason Warnes

I work for health care region in central Canada. We run a fairly large MS Terminal Server and Citrix envrionment. A collegue and I were curious about what the connection count on our server farm was like. I had just downloaded RRDTool and just started messing with Perl, so I was looking for something to try it out on.

So what we did was query our server farm every 10 minutes using a utility called TSQuery from Clusteresis, and logged the output to a file. Then using a Perl script we processes the output file and store the connection information in individual RRD's for each server. The Perl script then created individual graphs for each server like this:

Then, the Perl script creates a rainbow graph of all the connection information for all the servers to give an overall picture of how busy the environment is like this:

That rainbow graph was a REAL pain in the butt to get working. It was one of my first Perl scripts I ever wrote but it turned out nicely. It even takes into account servers that enter or leave the environment and will automatically shift colours accordingly so the entire RGB colour spectrum is used.

I love RRDTool and Perl!  I've only been using them for under a year and it's already becoming a valuable systems managment tool.