Hi,
This is a longstanding problem with collecting memory usage from UNIX hosts.
I think the best solution is to add an additional memory pool to UNIX devices which returns a "processed" value with actual used only. We did that with processors on UNIX hosts, where we return an "average" value, which is the only one you should really alert on.
Adam. On 24/02/2015 22:39:07, Hogan Whittall whittalh@yahoo-inc.com wrote: Me again. :) I love Observium, but the alerts are a bit of a pain point for me. Admittedly I don't have full, in-depth knowledge of the alerting mechanism but I was wondering why the check conditions and entities are separate. If it were possible (without completely rewriting the whole alert code) to have the entities be a part of the check conditions then that would, by design, allow us to set multiple check conditions on different entities within the same checker. See attached, I realize this doesn't work but this might help explain what I'm wanting. Since there's no entity for active used memory it's very hard to create actionable alerts for high memory utilization until it's too late and the host(s) start to swap. If the check conditions had metric, condition, value, and entity together then I could create such an alert by checking for physical memory used >= 95% *and* cached memory <= 10% (and... if so desired).
On the other hand, if the metrics included the entity then there would be no need to have the entities at all? mempool_physical_perc, mempool_cached_perc, etc.
I have high hopes for Observium and I'm trying to do what I can to tweak it to do what we need, but my PHP experience is limited. If I can manage to find a resource internally here at work to help out then hopefully we can contribute something back to the community if it's deemed worthy.
Just some thoughts. Thanks for all the time and effort being put into Observium!
-Hogan