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Re: [pcp] pcp grafana and graphite - How to convert pcp metric values in

To: Amer Ather <aather@xxxxxxxxxxx>, "Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [pcp] pcp grafana and graphite - How to convert pcp metric values into percent
From: Ken McDonell <kenj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 06:33:56 +1000
Cc: Martin Spier <mspier@xxxxxxxxxxx>, pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx
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On 03/07/14 03:57, Amer Ather wrote:> Frank and Nathan,
>
> So what I understand that rate conversion does not work for PMWEBAPI
> client but works fine for pmval and pmwebd graphite extension.

Just to back up what Frank said, ...

When we designed the PCP architecture ...

[Historical aside, Nathan mentioned seeing a 1995 copyright notice in the code, and speculated on a PCP 20-year anniversary ... I've checked my records and the conceptual design of PCP started in early 1993, but it was not until late 1993 or early 1994 that the first code was written, so the 20th anniversary of "starting" PCP has been and gone. But we barely had source control then, and certainly no obligations to add copyrights ahead of the initial product shipping in 1995].

... so, over 20 years ago, we made a very early decision to NOT hold client state in the collection (server) side of the PMAPI. We wanted the potential memory bloat from holding a history of previous values for all clients to live with the clients (that were running on workstations) not on the server(s).

I still believe this is semantically the correct thing to do ... clients, not pmcd, know what to do with a time series of metric observations.

So pminfo, pmprobe, pmlogger and PMWEBAPI all sit close PMAPI and choose not to implement rate conversion, but all the other end-user clients like pmval, pmie, pmchart, pmview, pmdumpstats, ... do implement rate conversion (in addition to other more exotic post-processing of the time series of metric values).

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