One-stop performance analysis using atop

I love atop and have been using it quite a bit over the last year. One warning, though -- the binary format changes rather frequently, and newer versions of the program are generally not backward-compatible with older formats. This can be a big problem if you are using it to capture performance regression data for test runs. The newer versions often add enough juicy features to make the upgrade worthwhile, but then you can no longer write a single tool that will allow comparing results with your older runs.

For a while, I dealt with it by writing a wrapper script that autodetected the appropriate version and used the text dump command-line options, but eventually it was enough of a nuisance that I patched in backwards compatibility. The patch wasn't accepted, I forget why. (I think the reason was reasonable, though.)