[collectd] [PATCH] system plugin (interrupts/context switches/forks) for collectd 4.7

[Florian Forster]

Hi Jari,

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 02:04:29PM +0100, Jari Takkala wrote:
> I found a patch by Nic Bellamy from January 2007 that adds a system
> plugin for collectd to gather total interrupts, context switches, and
> forks. The plugin wouldn't apply cleanly to version 4.7.1, so I've
> made some modifications and cleaned it up a bit.

thanks for bringing that patch to my attention again and updating it for
the current version. :) 

> I think it's useful to have a plugin to gather totals for these
> values, rather than the separate values in the CPU plugin. Can we get
> this commited?

In general, yes. I can see that the number of context switches or the
fork rate may be interesting. I see some problems with the
implementation, though:

  - The name: “system” is way to unspecific. I propose to split the
    plugin up in a “contextsw” and a “forkrate” plugin and leave IRQ
    specific stuff to the irc plugin.

  - Putting those three, totally unrelated values into one value list
    (^= one RRD file) is not a good idea. With the above proposal, the
    values would be split anyway. But even if everything stays in one
    plugin, the values must be completely independent.

By the way, with very little configuration it's possible to collect this
information with the `table' plugin that Sebastian has written [0].
Maybe that's an alternative for you? Feel free to add an example
configuration for this use case to the wiki page to help others :)

Regards,
-octo

[0] <http://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Plugin:Table>
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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