SensorLogger in ksysguard is not writing on disk file

[Duncan]

Francesco Lazzarotto posted on Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:23:31 +0200 as
excerpted:

> Hi everybody, please apologyse if this is not the suitable mailing list,
> but I haven't found a more specific list ... i'd like to ask for some
> help in troubleshooting a ksysguard app. feature, to use it in my work
> at our lab data-centre, to monitor some server resources.

ksysguard?  This is a reasonable list for it. =:^)  Unfortunately, almost 
a week after you posted, it seems none of the users reading here can 
answer your question.

FWIW, I can't help you much either, directly, but I had saved your 
question marked unread, to reply to later if nobody stepped up with 
better help than I can provide, and since they didn't, well, I'll do what 
I can and hope it helps.

As it happens, I used to use ksysguard in kde3, but when I switched to 
kde4 in the 4.2/4.3 era, not only was there no ksysguard plasmoid to 
replace the kicker applet that I relied on in kde3, but ksysguard itself, 
like much of kde4 at the time (despite what the kde PR said and despite 
the dropping of support for the latest reasonably workable version, then 
kde 3.5.10, even after promising support as long as there were users, 
guess a lot of current and former kde users know how much to trust kde 
claims now, about as far as they can launch a now decommissioned NASA 
shuttle!) was rather buggy, failing to properly save and restore its own 
configuration, among other problems.

So out of necessity, I switched to something else.  For my usage, current 
status display, not logging, that something else was first yasp-scripted 
because it was reasonably easy to learn to configuration language for and 
then to setup, then more recently, the somewhat more advanced 
superkaramba.

So, I've not used ksysguard since I decided the 4.x version was way too 
buggy to be useful when I tried it when switching from kde3, and I've 
never actually used the file logging functionality you are trying to use, 
as you state below.  That's why I tried to leave the post for someone who 
could better answer your question to tackle, but as no one has stepped 
up...

> I'm using ksysguard on kde 4.4.x and 4.6.y, and all seems to go fine,
> except for the SensorLogger function ... I'm trying to make ksysguard
> write sensor values on a text log file, as provided by the specific
> sensor type and following the user manual instructions.

> But I can't succeed in starting the file logging right clicking on the
> sensor pad, because when I right click I can't get this option, and  the
> red cross icon remains at the beginning of the file loggin line ...
> please can you help me? Do you know how to start loggin in any other
> way? Have I a bug in my ksysguard version??

As I said, I hadn't ever tried actually logging to a file, and in fact 
haven't used ksysguard itself for awhile (tho I still have it 
installed).  However, I just tried it now, on the now-current kde 4.7.2, 
and...

I see exactly the same behavior!

I even tried touching the file and restarting ksysguard, to see if it 
would allow me to start the logger once the file existed, with no luck.  
Further, I even opened the *.sgrd file and inspected the values there, to 
see if there was an "activated" value or some such I could toggle 
manually.  Again, no luck.

So either there's something that both you and I are missing and that 
doesn't seem to be in the "system monitor handbook" (why they call it the 
impossibly generic system monitor, I don't know, ksysguard is at least 
googlable, but at least the binary name remains the same, unlike "the 
application formerly known as kcontrol", now the impossibly generic AND 
incorrect "systemsettings", since with a couple exceptions, it's not 
systemsettings at all, but kde-specific settings, further specific to a 
single user!), or that functionality is still broken, as it would seem to 
have been since kde3 era, since you mention kde 4.4 and 4.6 and I tried 
4.7 now and know 4.2 and 4.3 were even MORE broken!

Therefore, I'd suggest filing a bug with kde on it, if one's not already 
filed.  But at this point I'd not count on it actually working properly 
any time soon.  Perhaps it will, but I'd be exploring other options if I 
were you, as I already was forced to do here for much of what I formerly 
depended on kde for.  (ksysguard wasn't the only thing.  But I'll spare 
you the list, save to mention that you get a *LOT* of performance back 
once you're able to turn off semantic-desktop at compile time, as I'm 
able to do now here on Gentoo, now that I killed kmail and ultimately all 
of kdepim.  Without that and with a graphics card that can handle the 
OpenGL effects reasonably well, kde4 finally feels as responsive as kde3 
used to, and I'm MUCH happier with it! =:^)

So I'd suggest trying something else.  I don't know specifically what 
you're trying to log, but one thing I found out with yasp-scripted and 
superkaramba is how much information is already exposed in /proc (for 
most memory, filesystem, process, uptime, etc, data) or /sys files (for 
power and hardware sensors) or with the sensors command (from the 
lm_sensors package).  By using commandline tools such as grep/sed/awk and 
shell patterns and redirection, it's very possible to get most (all?) of 
the data exposed in ksysguard, and then to either display them using yasp-
scripted or superkaramba as I did, or to log them, as you need to do.

You actually have a couple alternatives.  If you're already doing 
centralized syslogging or find it convenient enough to setup, you can 
setup scripts on each machine to write the desired data to syslog, and 
then have your syslogger spit out the logs as you need them.  syslog-ng 
is a quite full-featured syslogger that makes splitting up logs into 
separate files, as well as centralized logging, much easier to configure 
than some of the other syslog daemons do.

Alternatively, you likely already have ssh setup and ksysguardd 
configured for it on the remote systems.  Setting up commandline ssh 
scripts to harvest the information and log it as ksysguard would if it 
worked, shouldn't be too difficult.

As I said, I don't know what resources you're trying to log, but if it's 
something to do with hardware sensors, memory usage, cpu usage, disk 
activity/space, or network usage, I have had a bit of experience figuring 
out how to harvest that sort of information at the command line, for 
display here but once it's harvested it can be written to a log file just 
as easily, and may be able to save you a bit of duplicated work.  If 
you'd like, take a look at the grep/sed/etc stuff in yasp-scripted on
kde-look.org, as I submitted a number of scripts for it that it now ships 
with (in a duncan subdir of the scripts dir).  Or, you may contact me 
either on-list or off, as the logging details probably veer from on-topic 
for the list, and may not be appropriate for a public list in any case.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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