[Xymon] Improving memory monitoring

[Steve Hill]

On 14/04/15 15:11, Mike Burger wrote:

>> I'll say that I've never run into this...I've never had a system swap
>> memory out to disk unless active memory was utilized at a high
>> percentage...in either AIX or Linux.

It does spontaneously happen from time to time for me - may be the type 
of work loads these machines do - they do tend to have a fair amount of 
idle data in memory and the kernel quite rightly decides that using that 
for caches/buffers would be a better use.

Also, in situations where something _has_ used up a lot of RAM and 
therefore pushed stuff out to swap, Xymon continues to warn of high swap 
usage after that process has ended because the kernel obviously won't 
bother paging stuff back into the newly emptied RAM until it needs to.

>> Now, on the other side of this, to take a stab at the question, I'd
>> wager that, at present, you'd need to script such a test/alert..but I
>> would agree that it would be useful to be able to set an "alarm if
>> this or this" or an "alarm if this and this" type scenario. At
>> present, the only tests I can think of that allow this, "out of the
>> box" are the process monitors, where you can set minimum and maximum
>> thresholds.

Is there a way of setting analysis.cfg to use a script instead of the 
MEM* directives, or would that need to be a completely external job of 
some kind?

-- 
  - Steve Hill
    Technical Director
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