What is it?

Quick Look is a package to collect system statistics and output pretty graphics and (X)HTML pages. It allows system administrators to have a quick look on the status of their systems, without going for a more advanced (and heavier) solution.

Quick Look currently shows...

CPU and memory usage
Load average and process spawning rates
I/O operations
Network traffic rates
Tracked network connections

A static demo is available at http://www.carlos-rodrigues.com/projects/quicklook/demo/.

What does it need to run?

Python 2.3 or newer
Cheetah 0.9.16 or newer
Linux 2.4.27 or newer, 2.6.8 or newer
rrdtool 1.0.49 or newer
python-rrd 0.2.1 or newer

Older versions of any of these packages may work, but haven't been tested. Newer versions should also work, and you should use them if possible. If you notice any problems, please file a bug report and I'll try to fix them.

Installation

To install Quick Look into /opt/quicklook, just run the following commands:

make DESTDIR=/opt/quicklook install
cp extras/quicklook.cron /etc/cron.d/stats

By default, data files are stored in /var/opt/quicklook and webpages are generated into the /var/www/quicklook directory. If you wish to make changes to the output directories, or you chose a different installation directory, edit the quicklook.cron file before copying it.

Quick Look will now collect data and generate webpages every five minutes. No other steps are needed, but you can always run stats.py without parameters to check out the options available.

Upgrade from 1.0.x

When using Quick Look 1.0.x, a reboot could cause some of the graphs to have a huge spike. To prevent this from happening, the format for some of the data files (*.rrd) had to be changed.

Newer versions of Quick Look cannot read these files, and they have to be converted if you wish to keep the data contained in them. To do this, you can use the extras/convert.sh script.

For example, if you are storing data files in /var/opt/quicklook (default), they can be converted with the following command:

convert.sh /var/opt/quicklook

Backup this directory first, just in case.

Releases

Date	Version	Changes
2008-04-12	1.1	Fixed problem with occasional huge spikes in graphs after rebooting, but existing data files must be converted (see: Upgrade from 1.0.x).
2007-12-01	1.0.2	Fixed problems with disk devices with slashes in their names (e.g. HP SmartArray RAID volumes).
2006-12-17	1.0.1	Fixed problems with dhttpd. Automatic refresh for statistics pages. New color scheme for graphs.
2006-09-02	1.0a	Fixed problem with rrdtool 1.2.x.
2006-09-01	1.0	Initial public release.