[collectd] collectd libvirtstats plugin

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Florian Forster wrote:
> Hi Rich,
> 
> as promised, I've taken a more in-depth look at the `libvirtstats'
> plugin (I've adopted this as a working title for now and will do the
> renaming on the weekend or so..) and it looks very good, thanks again :)
> 
> The `_virDomainInfo' structure has the members `memory' and `maxMem'.
> Can one calculate `unused' or `free' (or whatever the preferred term in
> this particular case is) memory using `maxMem - memory'? Would that be
> an interesting metric?

Unfortunately no.  The "memory" field is the amount of physical RAM 
assigned to the virtual machine, and doesn't in any way reflect the 
amount of memory that the virtual machine might actually be using.  That 
information is hidden in the guest's kernel so is only available to an 
instance of collectd running inside the guest, and collectd already has 
a plugin to get that (eg. src/memory.c).  'maxMem' is a peculiar Xen 
thing to do with a guest's kernel requesting more memory from the 
hypervisor, but it still doesn't reflect anything particularly 
interesting about what (eg.) processes are doing inside the guest.

In any case, memory and maxMem are fixed numbers which only change when 
the administrator issues specific management commands.

So we could certainly report these figures in collectd without problem, 
but they're really not very interesting.

> I'm not sure what the best way to store the CPU usage is. Is the
> `cpuTime' member of the `_virDomainInfo' structure the same as the sum
> over all `(struct _virVcpuInfo).cpuTime'?

In theory yes, but because libvirt can't sample all these numbers in a 
single atomic operation it's unlikely that they would add up this way in 
practice.

 > Does collecting the total make
> sense in this case? I'd much rather use the same `type' for ``normal''
> CPU statistics and this case which would be much simpler if we didn't
> collect the total..

We can certainly remove the total from what is collected -- just delete 
the code :-)

> I've done some minor things while looking through the code. It basically
> a mix of coding style and personal convention. Since there's no Debian
> package yet I didn't install try to compile it yet. I'll install the
> library and fix the errors I've made as soon as I have some more spare
> time. The things I've changed are basically:
> - Rather use `sizeof (array);' than the `DATA_MAX_NAME_LEN' define.
> - NULL-terminate the strings unconditionally after `strncpy' or
>   `snprintf' was used.
> - Rather use
>   -- 8< --
>    if (status != 0) { handle_error (); }
>   -- >8 --
>   than
>   -- 8< --
>    if (status == -1) { handle_error (); }
>   -- >8 --
> 
> On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 02:00:12PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> In the types.db, I have set the max for virt_cpu_total to be
>> 256,000,000,000. [...] Therefore I have assumed here that
>> max CPUs = 256.
> 
> That's basically the reason why I'd rather collect each virtual CPU in a
> separate file and ``simply'' combine the graphs. This will work for n+1
> CPUs ;)

Yup, good plan.  Do you need a patch for this or is it easier for you 
just to delete the relevant code?

>> I'm using CSV output, which works, but it seems to report the
>> aggregate counter values instead of the differences.  Is that to be
>> expected?
> 
> Yes, that is expected. The changes I've made for the next feature
> release (4.3) include an easy way to get the rates for a counter value.
> So I will certainly add an option to store rates instead.

Thanks,

Rich.

-- 
Emerging Technologies, Red Hat - http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/
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