[Nagiosplug-devel] Re: [Nagios-devel] Performance values, what to use? (Was: Docume ntation Error)

[Karl DeBisschop]

Voon, Ton wrote:

> What examples of perfdata that return string values do you envisage? The
> only one that comes to mind is printer status (offline, waiting for paper,
> loading, printing, ready), but then these are statuses, not perfdata.
> 
> My view on perfdata is that it has to be a measureable value with ranges,
> hence graphable. This wouldn't be possible with strings.

I don't believe that perfdata needs to be graphable. It simply needs to 
be recordable.

That being said, I am not personally invested in this point - it's just 
that when I first looked at adding perdata to check_snmp, IIRC the list 
told me I should handle strings. That was what kept me from doing the 
work myself - I never had the time to think through a completely general 
way to handle all the data that snmp can return. I have not looked to 
see what the eventual implementtation does.

So when I suggested that string data should be considered, I was just 
trying to keep the thought alive for others.

That being said, it should not be hard to do. Just say that "=" is a 
reserver character.

To provide perfdata of NULL, do =NULL=.

To say "=", do "=="

Or something to that effect.

There may be existing encoding systems that would be suitable (isn't 
there a 8-to-7 bit email encoding that is similar?). If similar encoding 
systems exist, we should use them instead of my random "=" -- but you 
get the idea.

--
Karl