[Nagiosplug-devel] perfdata routines

[Ton Voon]

On 28 Nov, 2003, at 18:51, Karl DeBisschop wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-11-28 at 10:03, Voon, Ton wrote:
>> There is a standard perfdata routine which is in utils.c. However, 
>> this
>> expects parameters to be ints. For check_load, the data returned is 
>> floating
>> point numbers, which means we get rounded figure for perfdata which 
>> loses a
>> lot of information.
>>
>> Would it make sense for perfdata to expect all figures as floats 
>> instead? I
>> think this is more flexible and a bit more perl-like (where all 
>> numeric
>> scalars are floating point numbers). I guess a complaint would be
>> speed/memory, but that should be alright in the world of super-fast
>> computers?
>>
>> Any other opinions?
>
> When we discussed the 'standard' perfdata, we felt that since MRTG and
> other RRD tools are dominantly oriented around ints, the we would do 
> the
> same.
>
> I myself do not use these tools so much that I can vouch for the
> validity of the assumption that ints will make MRTG and RRD easier. But
> that was the logic.
>
I know RRD can use floats. In fact, I think it works better with floats 
because RRD only stores "averages" (I sometimes get a max figure of 
5.73 concurrent users on an application, which my manager thinks is a 
bit stupid - of course, that could just be my implementation).

I think the standard perfdata should store as much info as possible. 
The "convert to a graph tool" can make the decision to reduce down to 
integers.

Ton