Max Rydahl Andersen
We have a nice little audit log in our applications. One that contains a line for each "start" and "stop" for each event/process that can occur in the system.
Each line contains information about when, what, who, where - all stuff that can be used to track down whoever did something....but it is also a goldmine of information regarding the systems performance and usage.
So, I wrote a little "event extractor" program that converted all these "start" and "stop"'s (which can be nested by the way) into rows in a table - from here on I can extract all the statistics and graphs I can dream up and find the time to implement.
While writing this I came to think: "Hey, someone else much have done this before".
I then searched high and low after "log analyzers", "data mining", "data warehouse" etc. but all I find is tools that relates to www logs (who cares :) and nice scientific (but mostly academic) tools for analyzing "what kind of weather there should be before a customer buys a computer".
Can this be true ? Haven't anyone made a log analyzer that utilizes the well known concepts in data mining/warehousing to visualize and explore performance and usage of an application ?
It can't be true i've written the first of them ;) - please prove me wrong!
Update: ILOG Discovery has some nice visualization features...got to look into that ;)