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Re: [pcp] Verification and validation of performance metric values

To: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [pcp] Verification and validation of performance metric values
From: William Cohen <wcohen@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2016 11:51:20 -0400
Cc: PCP <pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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On 06/09/2016 08:24 PM, Nathan Scott wrote:
> Hi Will,
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>>   [...]  How, are the PCP metrics checked
>> to see if they are accurate/reasonable?
> 
> It depends - various strategies exist depending on the PMDA and the nature of
> the values being extracted, and the mechanisms involves.  There's some 
> examples
> over in qa/{778,835,876,987,1113} ... just a small subset to give a taste.
> 
>> For estimating network utilization using PCP the network.interface.baudrate
>> and network.interface.speed metrics should provide some indication of the
>> interface speed.  However, looking at the numbers produced by pmval below
>> they don't seem to be reasonable for 1Gbps ethernet connection of em1.
> 
> There's a couple of ways interface speed is extracted - ioctl and sysfs; 
> depends
> on kernel version.  The code is over in src/pmdas/linux/proc_net_dev.c - see 
> the 
> REFRESH_NET_SPEED references there.  The code is dependent on the 
> kernel/drivers
> giving good values - and there's also issues like pcp commit 9b616ace2284b622 
> to
> factor in from out of left field.
> 
> That said there could certainly be a PCP bug or two lurking here also.  Best 
> way
> to step through exactly what's happening here is:
> 
> $ gdb --args /usr/bin/pminfo -L -K clear -K 
> add,60,`pwd`/src/pmdas/linux/pmda_linux network.interface.speed
> 
> ... then set breakpoints in places like refresh_net_dev_ioctl, then "r" in 
> gdb.
> 
> cheers.
> 
> --
> Nathan
> 

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for the pointers to existing tests. I am glad to hear that there are 
some sanity checks in the pcp qa testsuite.  I understand that not every metric 
can be sanity checked, but having a larger set of them be correct will make it 
less likely for people to be mislead by bogus values.

I will take a closer look at why I am getting the odd values for 
network.interface.speed and network.interface.baudrate.

-Will

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