The focus of collectl has always been efficient performance data collection
and its display on a single machine. Colplot is a web-based plotting utility
that uses gnuplot to generate plots against collectl-generated files that
have been generated in plot format.

There are over 70 standard plots and a definition language that allows you
to define your own if none of the existing plots meet your needs. If there
are files for more than one system, colplot will generate separate plots
for each system. Colplot also has an option that allows it to periodically
redisplay the plots, which means if the files you point it to files that
are being updated in real-time, colplot can plot then in real-time. It can
also save plots as invidual png files, as pdf files if ghostscript is
installed or even email them to you. There is also a command line interface
that will run on an X-enabled terminal.

Colplot supports plot generation for multiple systems at a time and for
looking at the many types of collectl data as a set of plots, colplot is
really the only way to go. However, there are times when you want to look
at what's going on (or went on in the past) on your cluster and want to
see real numbers in which case you can always look at the data with collectl.