How to show the parallelism of requests in a nice graphical view?

Question

I have currently the following setup:

• An object graph of all requests read from an application server log file.
• Each line is represented as a RequestPart, with the following information: start time, stop time, tier, application part that is done.

I would like to draw / to graph something that shows the following:

• Show different colors for the tier the request part is in.
• Show for requests that are done in parallel, that they overlap.
• The relation of start and stop should be shown (not exactly, but approximately)

My first idea was to fill the rows of an excel sheet with the requests, and color each cell according to the time, the tier, ... But then I found out that excel does only allow 2^8 cells (with Excel < 2010), so that is not an option.

I'm a Ruby boy, so I checked RMagick and Gruff, but I don't like that at the end, I only have an image, so no further analysis is possible. Does anyone has an idea what to do (well, last resort: install Excel 2010, but my company will not like that).

Answer 1

Check out open source Timeline

Added

Tips for using it:

• send your data using JSON, faster parsing on the client compared with XML.
• suggest that your clients use FF, Safari or (fastest), Google Chrome
• Even faster parsing of dates: send Javascript datetime literals for parsing on client. Of course, at that point you're not sending kosher JSON, but it is the fastest way to send the data.