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Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2016 19:31:26 +0300
From: Slawa Olhovchenkov <slw@zxy.spb.ru>
To: Mark Rushakoff <mark@influxdb.com>
Cc: Ed Schouten <ed@nuxi.nl>, FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>,
 Allan Jude <allanjude@freebsd.org>,
 Jonathan Anderson <jonathan@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Sysctl as a Service, or: making sysctl(3) more friendly for
 monitoring systems
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On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 08:16:57AM -0800, Mark Rushakoff wrote:

> In Prometheus' node_exporter, it looks like they're calling sysctl to grab
> just
> CPU or just memory, etc., metrics.
> 
> On the InfluxDB side of things, I'm not seeing any Telegraf plugin to
> monitor
> sysctl in a generic way, although you could probably emit InfluxDB line
> protocol pretty easily from the exporter tool or something similar to that.
> 
> My impression, from a monitoring perspective, is that there isn't much
> demand
> to gather _everything_ in sysctl in a single call, although categorized
> subsets
> might be appealing.

Many sysctl nodes have

a) opaque binary values, w/ version depended formats
b) opaque binary values w/ size more then values
c) very large size: sysctl -b kern.msgbuf|wc
   10200   55998 1048505

Also, InfluxDB is hipster shit and for many cases need to preprocess
collected values, because imposible to calculate on Influx side.