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Questions on "howtograph.txt"

list Henrik Størner
Tue, 7 Feb 2006 17:13:10 +0100
Message-Id: <user-8086e4be765a@xymon.invalid>

Hi Larry,

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:55:35AM -0500, Sherman, Larry, GCM wrote:
I have been attempting to implement NCV graphing in hobbit, on version
4.1.2 and have run into a few problems/questions:

First, the question:  In the "slab" example, you custom test sends the
string "inode_cache" but in your NCV_slab entry in hobbitserver.cfg, you
have "inodecache:GAUGE".  How does this work???  
Hobbit silently strips everything except letters and numbers from the 
dataset name. So "inode_cache" is stripped of the underscore, and
becomes "inodecache". Section 4) of the "howtograph.txt" document
explains this:

   4) Arrange for the data to be collected into an RRD file
   ========================================================
   The data is obviously a name-colon-value formatted report, so we'll use the
   NCV module in Hobbit to handle it. Hobbit will find two datasets here:
   The first will be called "inodecache", and the second "dentrycache"
   (note that Hobbit strips off any part of the name that is not a letter
   or a number; Hobbit also limits the length of the dataset name to 19
   letters max. since RRD will not handle longer names).

Second, the problem:  We have a custom test which checks printer toner
levels by going to the web page of the printer with lynx.  Our test,
called "toner" sends data in the format:

 lj102.toner

	black     : 67
	cyan      : 56
      magenta   : 78
      yellow    : 43

The data does go into the rrd, but does not appear in the "<last_ds>"
field, as in your slab example, but rather in the <value> field.  Our
graph shows up, but there is no data in it.
Could you show us the first part of the "rrdtool dump" output for the
RRD file ?

My guess is that you've accidentally defined the RRD datasets with the
"DERIVE" datatype (the default) instead of "GAUGE" which is what you'll
need for this kind of data.
PS:  I have been a BB user since 1999, and moved our servers to hobbit
last Fall.  We absolutely love it.  Thanks Henrik!
You're welcome :-)


Regards,
Henrik