Hi Larry,

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:55:35AM -0500, Sherman, Larry, GCM wrote:

I have been attempting to implement NCV graphing in hobbit, on version 4.1.2 and have run into a few problems/questions:

First, the question: In the "slab" example, you custom test sends the string "inode_cache" but in your NCV_slab entry in hobbitserver.cfg, you have "inodecache:GAUGE". How does this work???

Hobbit silently strips everything except letters and numbers from the dataset name. So "inode_cache" is stripped of the underscore, and becomes "inodecache". Section 4) of the "howtograph.txt" document explains this:

4. Arrange for the data to be collected into an RRD file

   The data is obviously a name-colon-value formatted report, so we'll use the NCV module in Hobbit to handle it. Hobbit will find two datasets here: The first will be called "inodecache", and the second "dentrycache" (note that Hobbit strips off any part of the name that is not a letter or a number; Hobbit also limits the length of the dataset name to 19 letters max. since RRD will not handle longer names).

Second, the problem: We have a custom test which checks printer toner levels by going to the web page of the printer with lynx. Our test, called "toner" sends data in the format:

lj102.toner

black : 67 cyan : 56 magenta : 78 yellow : 43

The data does go into the rrd, but does not appear in the "<last_ds>" field, as in your slab example, but rather in the <value> field. Our graph shows up, but there is no data in it.

Could you show us the first part of the "rrdtool dump" output for the RRD file ?

My guess is that you've accidentally defined the RRD datasets with the "DERIVE" datatype (the default) instead of "GAUGE" which is what you'll need for this kind of data.

PS: I have been a BB user since 1999, and moved our servers to hobbit last Fall. We absolutely love it. Thanks Henrik!

You're welcome :-)

Regards, Henrik