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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