Let's say I have a room of computers that I want to show how each is utilized, and I have separate text documents that shows monthly user counts, and for each cpu what software was launched on each. I'd love to show a graph of usage over time and what was used to determine future software / hardware needs based on trends.
What is the best way to collect this data in one place and visualize it? Is there any tools that automate this process easily? Excel manual data entry and graphs is what I'm working with and thinking there has to be a better way.
Any recs would be appreciated.
and all i have to work with is text docs for each machine. trying to help a friend.
you have an hourly, or daily text doc that already shows what you want to report, CPU Utilization, Buffer, memory threads, etc, and you want to build something off of those text documents?
If so, without the use of a 3rd party monitoring software, you're going to have to code something to parse the txt docs and put it in some database format...or am I way off base here?
I believe the monthly usage counts are basically a number - like 50 users for January.
Is coding something the best option? What language?
a simple VBS script could do this for you
I use New Relic for entire stack monitoring. App Dynamics is cut from the same cloth. It is also application monitoring so I can correlate cpu usage issues with front end performance.

Wondering how to take existing text patterns and easily / repeatedly turn them into something useful for reporting.