ESXplot
esxplot is a GUI application that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program takes a single command line argument which is the esxtop batch mode output file. You can also simply start esxplot without any arguments, and enter a dataset file via the File attribute of the menu bar. Esxplot loads the data in this file and presents the metrics as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel. In the right panel, a graph is plotted (value over time) of the selected metric, in this way, you can “browse” the contents of these somewhat unwieldy files.
esxplot in action
A good tool, but useless on large (with timespan an hour or so and 100MB+ size) datasets. At least on Ubuntu it just starts consuming a lot of RAM and the system runs out of swap eventually.
Also Windows installer did not work for me on XP 32bit – it gave me python DLL error
I have tested this on datasets of 130MB with no problem on Ubuntu 9.10 with 4GB of memory and 8GB of swap so maybe your system is too small. The next version should load faster with large datasets, and not require so much main memory. Some people are reporting this python.dll error on versions of Windows 2003, but it works for some, not sure what the root of the problem is. Some have said that installing Python has fixed this issue, but others don’t have to install anything.
I think you could pick up that comment and use it as a blog post. What you wrote is great advice any way that you look at it.