[Nagiosplug-devel] Re: [Nagios-devel] Performance values, what to use? (Was: Docume ntation Error)
Karl DeBisschop
karl at debisschop.net
Thu Sep 9 04:58:33 CEST 2004
Voon, Ton wrote:
> What examples of perfdata that return string values do you envisage? The
> only one that comes to mind is printer status (offline, waiting for paper,
> loading, printing, ready), but then these are statuses, not perfdata.
>
> My view on perfdata is that it has to be a measureable value with ranges,
> hence graphable. This wouldn't be possible with strings.
I don't believe that perfdata needs to be graphable. It simply needs to
be recordable.
That being said, I am not personally invested in this point - it's just
that when I first looked at adding perdata to check_snmp, IIRC the list
told me I should handle strings. That was what kept me from doing the
work myself - I never had the time to think through a completely general
way to handle all the data that snmp can return. I have not looked to
see what the eventual implementtation does.
So when I suggested that string data should be considered, I was just
trying to keep the thought alive for others.
That being said, it should not be hard to do. Just say that "=" is a
reserver character.
To provide perfdata of NULL, do =NULL=.
To say "=", do "=="
Or something to that effect.
There may be existing encoding systems that would be suitable (isn't
there a 8-to-7 bit email encoding that is similar?). If similar encoding
systems exist, we should use them instead of my random "=" -- but you
get the idea.
--
Karl
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