Gantt Charts in Open Office

This might help you out when analyzing time series data.

In this particular situation I’m looking at a bunch of SOA web services that get called synchronously in the backend infrastructure. The logs have entries with a unix timestamp, service description and duration. What I want to do is view the data in a Gantt Chart format. This link from Microsoft put me on the right track.

Here’s how to do it in Open Office.

The original data highlighted in green has a unix timestamp, service name and duration in milliseconds.

I’ve inserted some additional columns as follows:
elapsed_secs = timestamp – minimum of timestamp column
duration_secs = duration_msecs / 1000

Then I’ve created a chart using columns B, C & D as the data source i.e. B1:E10
Create a stacked horizontal bar chart, remove the line colour and fill for elapsed seconds data series and there you have it. A nice little gantt chart demonstrating when services were called and a visual indication of their duration.

I know it’s really simple, but often the simple things demonstrate a point better than bucket loads of data. Here’s an ODS and XLS template.