[hobbit] Feature request - thresholds for CPU utilisation (not load average)

[Taylor Lewick]

Funny you brought this up just now, because today I noticed if you load
the windows client, either bbwin or bbnt, those allow you to set alerts
for CPU utilization, but both big brother and hobbit only understand
load average, so I keep getting alerts saying load is very high, when
the cpus are around 20-50%  Well a load of 20 on a linux/unix server
would be very high, but Windows boxes don't really have the load average
concept, just the cpu utilization, so if you are monitoring utilization
on windows clients you have to change the load to something like 70 90
to avoid getting red pages.

-----Original Message-----
From: Buchan Milne [mailto:bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net] 
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 12:44 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: [hobbit] Feature request - thresholds for CPU utilisation (not
load average)

Something I have been wondering about for a while is whether it would be

possible to have thresholds on the CPU utilisation. While we have
thresholds 
for load averages, in some cases these have to be relatively high (e.g.
2 to 
4 times the number of CPUs) due to the impact of IO wait on load average

(e.g, our SAN-attached NFS servers often have a load average of over 10,
with 
a CPU utilisation of 50%, when reading over 10k blocks/sec). However, it
then 
makes it difficult to catch a process in CPU-race (as much less IO gets
done, 
IO wait is low, and load average is almost exactly 1 *CPUs).

The CPU utilisation is already reported (in the vmstat data), which is
how I 
know the above about our NFS servers (vmstat/vmstat1 graph).

This would also remove the complication of thresholds differing between 
servers with different numbers of CPUs, and maybe work better for
Windows 
clients (which don't seem to have a concept of load average).

(I don't mean thresholds for load average should be removed ... I would
love 
to have thresholds for both load average and CPU utilisation).

Regards,
Buchan

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