On Thu, March 19, 2015 5:19 pm, Jeremy Laidman wrote:
On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 2:25 AM Neal, Jonathan W via Xymon <xymon at xymon.com> wrote:
I have never monitored any Redhat systems before, all Solaris in the past for the most part. Since top and free always show all the physical memory in use on Redhat, how do people monitor memory usage accurately with Xymon?
Xymon tracks swap usage, physical memory usage, and "actual" memory usage. The last of these is what most people care about. In analysis.cfg you can set thresholds on any of these. On my system the thresholds for physical memory usage are 100% for yellow and 101% for red.
Under Linux, "actual memory" is obtained from the output of "free" which is recorded in the [free] section of the client data, specifically from the "buffers/cache" line. The value for "actual used" comes from the first number. The "actual total" is the total physical memory and is the first number in the "Mem:" line.
Currently the Memory tag shows as yellow under this new Redhat server,
though in my mind it should be green.
For actual memory usage, yes.
Mem: 16435916k total, 16311612k used, 124304k free, 6255112k buffers
Swap: 18481144k total, 0k used, 18481144k free, 6391000k cached
total used free shared bufferscached Mem: 16435916 16311588 124328 0 6255116 6391040 -/+ buffers/cache: 3665432 12770484 Swap: 18481144 0 18481144
In your case, on your "memory" status page you would see "Actual 3579M 16050M 22%" meaning 3.5GB non-cache/buffer RAM usage used out of 16GB total physical RAM, which is 22%.
So actual usage is 22%. If your yellow threshold for MEMACT is the default of 90, then this 22% is well short of triggering a yellow condition. And it must be something else.
On your memory status page each line should have its own coloured dot. Which of the lines has a yellow dot? I'm guessing it's the "Physical", and someone has modified the MEMPHYS threshold in analysis.cfg to go yellow at 99% instead of 100%.
J
The whole concept of 'free memory' is really a bit tricky. Linux 3.14+ has provided a solution in /proc/meminfo (https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=3...), but it's not available everywhere. Furthermore, the 'free -a' output depends on your specific version of procps(-ng) and possibly your sysctl setting of meminfo_legacy_layout (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/htm...).
Regards,
-jc