Any easy performance data exploration programs?

Question

I'm trying to optimize some software, so I generated a large volume of real world performance measurements - nothing fancy, just a few numbers describing the case plus time in milliseconds.

I did some basic analysis on it - mostly dividing data into buckets in various ways and calculating bucket averages - and it was quite helpful in giving me a general idea, but it seems these relationships are more complex than I expected.

In the mean time I'll keep throwing various formulas at the data, but perhaps by some chance there exists a tool I could use to explore such data visually, and look for patterns this way? Any recommendations?

Answer 1

I like Excel for this sort of raw data performance analysis. Dump your raw data into a .csv file, load it up in Excel and from there you can group and graph the data however you want. Once graphed, often discernible patterns will emerge.

Answer 2

If you are willing to spend some money, Tableau and Spotfire are good at visualizing data of practically any kind.