[Kst] Kst acceptable time formats

[James Taylor]

Hi,

Thanks for kst! I can see that it will be wonderful once I crack this
problem I'm having with time formats.

I'm trying to work with the CSV output from the dstat system monitoring
utility. I do not seem to be able to get kst to correctly interpret the
time format that dstat outputs, and even if I could, I cannot work out
how to make it use that as the X-axis in all the graphs each time I load
a new CSV file.

The dstat command I'm using is actually this:

dstat -tlpcmgfdny --tcp --nocolor --output dstat.csv >> dstat.log &

which generates lots of columns of data, but here is a simple example of
the dstat output of just a few columns:

dstat -tlc

----system---- ---load-avg--- ----total-cpu-usage----
  date/time   | 1m   5m  15m |usr sys idl wai hiq siq
27-01 00:36:34|1.88 1.21 0.99| 66  14  20   0   0   0
27-01 00:36:35|1.81 1.21 0.99| 55  17  27   0   0   1
27-01 00:36:36|1.81 1.21 0.99| 57  21  21   0   0   1
27-01 00:36:37|1.81 1.21 0.99| 71  17  12   0   0   0
27-01 00:36:38|1.81 1.21 0.99| 61  17  21   0   0   1
27-01 00:36:39|1.81 1.21 0.99| 54  14  32   0   0   0
27-01 00:36:40|2.14 1.29 1.01| 49  17  34   0   0   0
27-01 00:36:41|2.14 1.29 1.01| 60  10  29   0   0   1
27-01 00:36:42|2.14 1.29 1.01| 57  43   0   0   0   0
27-01 00:36:43|2.14 1.29 1.01| 51  26  22   0   0   1
27-01 00:36:44|2.14 1.29 1.01| 59  12  29   0   0   0
27-01 00:36:45|2.13 1.30 1.02| 54  16  28   2   0   0
27-01 00:36:46|2.13 1.30 1.02| 64  23  13   0   0   0

The above is the screen output but the CSV file has the same data
including the time in that same format. This time format is not
recognised by kst, or I don't understand how to make it happen. I could
write a small filter in Perl to change the date into a format that kst
recognised if only I knew exactly what that should be. A nice standard
format would be RFC-3339 for example. Can kst handle that?

Once I have a format that kst understands I want to be able to plot the
values in the other columns with the time on the x-axis, because the
time steps are not always regular so plotting against INDEX does not
show accurate results. I need to plot again time.

Can you point me in the right direction please?

Thank you.

Yours,
-- 
James Taylor