More Granular data than 300 second samples, duh!

[Scott Walters]

One of the most common requests to the trending of data is "How do I
make the charts graph data samples which are smaller than 300
seconds?"  And the answer has been, you have the source, have fun.

The original design decision that Henrik inherited was larrd should
only be for capacity planning and NOT real-time performance analysis.
Do one thing and do it well.

I had a thought the other day, and I think we could possibly get the
"best of both worlds."

Instead of

$ vmstat 300 2 (resulting in one 300 second sample)

why not

$ vmstat 5 61 (resulting in sixty 5 second samples)

The data would still only be transported every five minutes, but
contain more granular samples.

This could not be done for all metrics, but many.  This would also
require the RRAs of the all the RRDs be re-made (export, re-create,
import).  But I've that's been on my mind anyway cause the original
RRA structure was based on screen sizes for 800x600, instead of
business requirements.

Henrik, do you follow my thinking?  It's kinda hard for me to believe
it's taken me over five years to think of this!

My biggest concern is not the technical details of the collectors and
RRD/RRA restructuring, but inflicting resource usage on servers
measuring themselves.

$ vmstat 1 301 would definitely be a bad idea.

Scott Walters
-PacketPusher