Re: monitoring load average

[Nate Campi <nate@campin.net>]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 07:08:29AM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jan 2003 20:15, Javier wrote:
> > Perhaps you can try with vmstat. It gives you the CPU idle time, so you
> > can easily program an script that returns (100 - idle time). Use
> > netsaint_statd plugin to return to netsaint server what your script
> > returns.
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion.  However I still need to have a separate script 
> running vmstat as it's results are wildly inaccurate if run as "vmstat", you 
> need to run "vmstat 2" to get reliable results (and the first line won't be 
> the one you want).
> 
> I was thinking of having something like vmstat constantly running and 
> periodically writing it's results to a file.
> 
> Another issue is that I don't want a load spike to trigger an alert.  So I 
> want to have an average over say a minute "vmstat 60" (which makes it 
> impossible to run vmstat from the script, reading from an output file from a 
> daemon process is the only real option).

I'd use SNMP. I graph the basic stuff you're looking for with RRDtool:
<URL:http://www.campin.net/perl/RRDsnmp.cgi?host=vpn-pat>

I don't do any I/O stuff, but you could look for it in the MIB2 host MIB
or UCD enterprise MIBs - I'm sure there's something. If there isn't, do
what I do for DNS stat graphing and fire off a shell script to extend
it: <URL:http://www.campin.net/DNS/graph.html>

A major benefit to using SNMP is that many other network monitoring and
management systems utilize it, so if you deploy one it'll be able to
work with your existing infrastructure.
-- 
Nate Campi   http://www.campin.net 

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I've run this poem threw it,
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Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
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 -Janet Minor  
 
"Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked."  -Jeff Pesis