[Nagiosplug-devel] Re: Suggested alterations to the Performan ce Protocol (Re: Nagiosplug-devel digest, Vol 1 #653 - 5 msgs)

[Andreas Ericsson]

Yves Mettier wrote:
>>It seems there are two arguments here:
>>
>>1) some users might want more presision than nagios provides. You are
>>not one of them. Nor am I. Do people really need better than one-second
>>resolution? If they think they do, how often is it reallt accurate when
>>it come from different machines which wil have dispersion in ther
>>clocks? (I'm thinking of a distributed setup here)
> 
> 
> If you make a graph for only one machine, there is no dispersion of the clocks. I agree
> for the rest.
> 

If you make a graph for only one machine you can do just fine with a 
gnumeric spreadsheet (or a paper and a pen, for that matter).

>>2) other programs run outside of the context of nagios do not provide
>>the nagios time macro.
>>
>>In that case, couldn't the progam provide that data? So if tou run a log
>>analysis program to extract events from a log, you should run it outside
>>the context of nagios and report the data to the handler in the same way
>>nagios does.
> 
> Right, and this is what we will probably do here.
> However, for somebody who needs precision and who runs another tool to make perf data
> for nagios-compatible perfdata tool (like perfparse), we need that compatibility. And
> nagios plugins are unable to give something compatible with higher precision.
> 

They most certainly are not. It's pretty trivial to add such things, and 
  most of them already output something of of the sort where 
appropriate. If the TIMET discussion is about moving graphs a nanometer 
left or right, I'd say it's had its time in the limelight. If it is 
about plugin execution time, I'd say it's fairly trivial to add such 
output to the plugins, simply call it exec_time and display it in 
whatever measurements the plugin itself thinks is appropriate.

> Is it a good idea to extend the protocol for such a need, even if nagios does not use it ?
> 

Not as long as perfparse is a Nagios add-on, and not a standalone 
product. If you want a standalone graphing product you'd probably go for 
something like cacti or mrtg anyways.

> I'm still thinking...
> if we adapt our parsers to be able to read the following, is the problem solved ?
> 

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer