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[9.003] Reporting Graphs use units which are difficult to understand

Hi,

in 9.003, my memory/swap graph is not rendering the swap usage in a readable manner. It says swap is currently 204m (I don't know what 'm' means), and nothing is shown on the graph.

'free' reports 3MB swap currently:


loginuser@fw:/home/login > free

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:       2073360    1944020     129340          0     377780     488120

-/+ buffers/cache:    1078120     995240

Swap:      1048572       3152    1045420

What does '204m' mean? thousandths of a percent? Couldn't we just display it as 0% or 0.2% instead?

I think this has been brought up before, but probably not recently.

Barry

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0 BarryG over 12 years ago

While I'm at it...

Some of my network graphs report in 'M' (upper case), some report in 'k' (lower case), and some report in 'm' (lower case).
Another reports with no unit specified.
See pics.

Barry
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0 BarryG over 12 years ago

Wireless Protection graphs show connection failure averages in 'm'.

ISTM that the average should probably be reported in the same unit as the min and max.
I don't know if rrdtool allows for that or not though.

Barry
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0 GMF over 12 years ago

SI units / prefixes for rrd tool | daverdave.com

Maybe this helps to understand units for rrd-graphs.
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0 BarryG over 12 years ago

Right.

I would still argue that SI units on memory and network graphs are not useful, other than the common kilo, Mega, Giga.

There's no such thing as a millibyte or a millibit, and reporting percentages at thousands of a percent accuracy is pointless and confusing.
How can current traffic on a NIC be 654millibits/s? (I know it's a 5-minute average, but still.)

I hope that there is a way to improve this. It's confusing, and I've got PHBs who look at the Executive Reports and I would rather not have to try to explain this.

Thanks,
Barry
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