make printable	new:	see also:
		operational HealthCheck job files trendPlotter configuration trendPlotter tool qc1Plotter web interface
topics: trending archive | history plots | maintenance

trendPlotter: how to operate

General structure of trending plot archive. The set of trending plots spans a 2D matrix: for each report, there is a set of HISTORY plots, and the current HEALTH plot. Let's assume there are four different reports, and there are HISTORY plots since 2015. Then at the end of 2016 the trending report archive has the following reports:

This information is steadily growing, and the challenge is to present this in an easy-to-use and intuitive way. The HC monitor has a HISTORY part where the historical Health Check pages are collected.

The Health Check monitor offers a view to all HEALTH reports. It is the main portal to the trending reports and web pages:

Creating all HISTORY plots for a given report. The option -A (all) creates an executable file with all trendPlotter calls required to create the historical report set. Let's assume that you need to create all historical BIAS reports, starting from 2014-04, up to 2016-10. Then calling 'trendPlotter -r BIAS -A' creates a file $TMP_DIR/list_history containing all calls

trendPlotter -r BIAS -t HISTORY -s 2014-04 -f
trendPlotter -r BIAS -t HISTORY -s 2014-07 -f
trendPlotter -r BIAS -t HISTORY -s 2014-10 -f
...
trendPlotter -r BIAS -t HISTORY -s 2016-10 -f

Important: You need to edit this file to remove the option -f, if you want to do tests and not publish the results.
In any case, the file $TMP_DIR/list_history won't be executed directly but needs to be invoked by the user.

Creating all HISTORY navigation bars. The option -N (navigation bars) creates or refreshes all HISTORY navigation bars for a specified report. This is necessary whenever a new time period is added to the historical record, or of course if a new report has been defined. Calling 'trendPlotter -r BIAS -N [-f]' will create all history navigation bars and publish them if option -f is set.

The START_DATE for a report is configured in config.tp_<report>.

Creating the latest HISTORY plot. Calling 'trendPlotter -r BIAS -t HISTORY [-f]', i.e. without explicit start date, will let the tool determine the latest ("current") history plot. The tool evaluates the current date, and the configured RANGE. This is useful for updating the current HISTORY plot regularly by a cronjob.

Maintenance

How to maintain HEALTH plots. Write all HEALTH CHECK jobs which can be called by autoDaily into the job file $DFO_JOB_DIR/JOBS_HEALTH:

trendPlotter -r <report> -t HEALTH -f

Then, they will be updated incrementally by autoDaily which is called once per hour by a cronjob.

In order to be always up-to-date and complete, write all HEALTH CHECK jobs in a second job file $DFO_JOB_DIR/JOBS_TREND and call this explicitly twice a day (every 12 hours).

Find the current operational JOBS_HEALTH and JOBS_TREND for FLAMES/GIRAFFE here.

How to maintain navigation bars. You will also need to refresh all HISTORY navigation bars regularly, since every 60/90/180/365 days a new HISTORY plot will be added to the set by JOBS_HISTORY, and as long as the navigation bars are not updated, that plot is not linked to the other pages and hence invisible. Write the jobs into $DFO_JOB_DIR/JOBS_NAVBAR:

trendPlotter -r <report> -N -f

and execute it say once or twice per month. Find the current operational JOBS_NAVBAR for FLAMES/GIRAFFE here.

Note: the trendPlotter output pages have a meta tag in their header to auto-refresh every 60 seconds, and to be not cached. Also, the score png files, as well as the main png and the closeup png files are linked with a unique ID (generated at runtime from the current date and the PID). Together, these tricks provide an always up-to-date browser display.