Getting started with the latest release

Compile

Dependences

To compile picviz, you will need:

• Compile suite (gcc, make etc..)
• Cmake (http://www.cmake.org)
• pcre library (http://www.pcre.org/)
• libevent (http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent/)

Optional:

• Python development library (http://www.python.org)
• QT4 python bindings (http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/download)

Compile and install

Core

As a regular user:

$ make

As root:

# make install
# ldconfig

Bindings:

As a regular user:

$ cd src/libpicviz/bindings/python/

As root:

# python ./setup.py install

Frontend:

As a regular user:

$ cd src/frontend

As root:

# python ./setup.py install

Use

You can create your graphs using the language. To learn this please refer to the Picviz language page. Those files are named with the extension 'pcv'. Samples are available in the source directory 'sample'.

However the best is to generate this language. And perl being a great language for this, one can use the tools available with the sources in the directory 'tools'. So to graph your logs easily one can do:

$ cd tools/
$ sudo ./syslog2picviz.pl /var/log/syslog > syslog.pcv

In my case, the syslog file is pretty big:

$ wc -l syslog.pcv 
87139 syslog.pcv

To convert the file into a SVG file, the binary pcv is used with its svg plugin:

$ pcv -Tsvg syslog.pcv > syslog.svg

Because the file is pretty big, your svg viewer may not work. So you can use the png plugin:

$ pcv -Tpngcairo syslog.pcv > syslog.png

Which would produce the following graph:

Default values positioning is not relative. As of now, this is not the default behavior to put data in relative mode but it soon may change. To active it, simply add at the beginning of the graph:

engine {
    relative = "1";
}

This graph is the result for the same data than above but in relative mode: