Documentation Error - a case to use U

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Folks,

I am writing to thank you for your letters and say

<something obvious and probably wrong .. get ready>

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 08:36:06AM +0100, Ben Clewett wrote:
> That's right, from A to C.  Yes this will be a straight connecting line.
> 
> I understand your feeling on this being miss-guided.  But I see this 
> information as a record of the latency of the plugin, not a check on 
> whether there is a response.  That is better taken care of by returning 
>  WARNING or CRITICAL from plugin exit code.
> 
> In PerfParse I am toying with leaving a gap in the graph where a value 
> is expected but not forthcomming, if the user selects some option. 
> However this is difficult as the user may have changed the timeing of 
> the plugin and the gap may be an expected response :)
> 
> Either way, I would prefure to have no value, than to try and code a 
> response for an infinite value.
> 
> Unless the people who designed the plugin performance protocol want to 
> give us some valid extensions for coding an infinite value, or coding a 
> NULL value.  Something like:
> 
> | latency=INFms
> 
> or
> 
> | latency=NULLms
> 
> But this is a better question for another news group, to which I'll make 
> a posting now :)

Firstly, I haven't been paying much attention here so I prob should 
desist but if the data is going in an RRD then isn't 'U' a reasonable 
value because

1 plugin can always replace 'don't know' or nothing with 'U'

2 RRD deals with an 'unknown' value by interpolation. In this case, 
however a 'U' is an NaN, which it also is able to deal with.

3 attempting to scale a large or small value is probably infeasable - 
reading MAX and MIN values from the RRD is feasable in a plugin 
class/framework environmnt which doesn't exist at the moment ...

Even after having considered again that a graph looks better with a max 
latency in the case of no response, it still is wrong and bad to do so - 
drop data such as this by Using U.

</something obvious and probably wrong>

> 
> Regards, Ben.
> 

-- 
Stanley Hopcroft

Network specialist, IT Infrastructure
IP Australia
Ph: (02) 6283 3189  Fax: (02) 6281 1353
PO Box 200 Woden  ACT 2606
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au


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