[collectd] Strange results with tail plugin

[Florian Forster]

Hi Marcin,

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 01:48:09PM +0100, Marcin Rzepecki wrote:
> Type "counter"
...
> <!-- 2008-11-24 02:23:50 CET / 1227489830 --> <row><v> 6.1356675443e+07 </v></row>

did you restart the daemon when this value appeared?

The type `counter' does not have a maximum value, so when you restart
the daemon, the counter decreases. RRDtool will then assume the counter
``overflowed'', resulting in huge values.

Assuming that you will never get more than 7777 mails per second, you
can get around this by adding a new `type' to the types.db (see
types.db(5) for more details):
  email_counter  value:COUNTER:0:7777

If you have this issue just this once, you can set the maximum value
manually, too (see rrdtune(1) for details):
  rrdtool tune "$FILE" -a value:7777

After setting the maximum manually, you can ``filter out'' these peaks
like this:
  rrdtool dump "$FILE" | rrdtool restore -r - "$FILE.new"
  mv "$FILE.new" "$FILE"

If you did *not* restart collectd when these peaks appear, something
very weird is happening. I sincerely hope that's not the case ;)

HTH, regards,
-octo
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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