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Re: [pcp] Introducing pmrep - Performance Metrics Reporter

To: myllynen@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [pcp] Introducing pmrep - Performance Metrics Reporter
From: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 03:23:04 -0500 (EST)
Cc: pcp developers <pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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Reply-to: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Thread-index: Q1k9mYKfnCeWZ5op/GV4x30FpG+Gvw==
Thread-topic: Introducing pmrep - Performance Metrics Reporter
Hi Marko,

----- Original Message -----
> Hi,
> 
> On 2015-10-30 08:37, Nathan Scott wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > 
> > As we discussed on IRC, that is at a much lower level than is relevant at
> > this stage of evolution of a generic reporting API - if/when another new
> > fetchgroup API comes along, it will be required to sit below these higher
> > level APIs to prove its worth.  So currently I'm more concerned about the
> > high level API - pcp.pmcc is the start of one such API, but we don't have
> > to use that if it doesn't suit... we'll see.
> 
> yeah, I'm also also taking the wait&see approach on that front, I think
> finalizing pmrep will also help a bit to see potential client side
> requirements for such an API.

Sounds good.

> > The 'cc' in pmcc stands for "Convenience Classes" - when current pmcc does
> > not suffice (and it definitely will not - doesn't try to do this level of
> > reporting granularity) we should be thinking if/how we can extend it with
> > classes more convenient for generic reporting scripts.
> 
> If we find consensus and nail down the configuration file / metricspec
> details, that might be the other side where generalization would be
> possible.

+1

> > Do you have a public git repo somewhere? (github?)  Would it make life any
> > easier if you had a git.pcp.io account for your pcp tree?  (if so, please
> > send thru your public ssh key if so & I'll set that up)
> 
> That would probably be helpful, me operating on my own private tree is
> not optimal although so far probably hasn't been an issue.

Yeah, its not an issue - I'll look into QA'ing and maybe merging pmrep early
next week, and you can follow up with smaller delta patches to the master
branch thereafter if you like.

> > We will want man pages and so on too before merging, but that can come
> > later
> > - automated testing of the currently-working-stuff would be most helpful at
> > this stage.
> 
> I've now written a complete pmrep.1 man page and fixed few issues found

Cool.

> during the process and added few new features while at it. I changed the
> "compact" metric spec to allow defining instances to be reported (not
> yet implemented though) so that the order is roughly
> "most-significant-modifier-first".
> 
> Unless there are any suggestions I'm starting to think that the user
> interface should be considered stable in that sense that any possible
> changes should be done without changing the current options and syntax
> if at all possible.

Excellent.

> The only thing might be the default time format used. It's currently
> %H:%M:%S but timestamps with microsecond precision would be somewhat

I think without microseconds will make a good default - most tools tend
to do this, and that extra precision is only rarely needed (so not worth
cluttering default reports with usually).

> I enhanced the Zabbix reporting so that it can send metrics in batches
> (in the spirit of zabbix_sender(8)) and it seems to work reliably. The
> downside on that front is the the zbxsend upstream hasn't responded to
> my zbxsend / Python 3 patches. One possibility might be to provide
> pcpzbxsend which would essentially be zbxsend+fixes but I'm not sure
> would this be optimal.

OK, yep.  How much code are we talking about, in the zbxsend module?
(could you send me a pointer?  not sure I have that code handy).

> For the time being I've added a note to the man
> page the Zabbix output target being experimental.

We still need to find a way to handle that dependency for packaging - I'll
look into that some more early next week too.

> The next step for me is the write the pmrep.conf.5 page, hoping to
> finish it this or next week.

That'd be great, thanks Marko.

cheers.

--
Nathan

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