I am thinking about adding an optional metric "Alias" that can be assigned to each metric through the gmond.conf file. The upside to this would be that the web front-end would no longer have to display the cryptic metric name for all of the graph titles and constant metrics. If an alias for the metric name was supplied, then the front-end could use the alias when it instructs RRD to create the graphs. However, there is also a downside. In order to do this, it will require that the metric message that is sent between gmond's, change in order to propagate the alias from each node up into gmetad. By changing the metric message, newer 3.1.x versions of gmond will no longer be able to talk to an older 3.0.x gmond or earlier. So the first question would be, does that matter? Is it OK to break compatibility between 3.0.x and 3.1.x versions of Ganglia? When users upgrade to 3.1.x, are they likely to do a complete upgrade all at once or expect to only upgrade some machines but not all? Another issue would be that by assigning an Alias, a metric on one machine could possible be presented by a different name than the same metric on another machine. Hopefully, this issue would be minor due to the fact that the metric name would be more descriptive of what the metric actually is, but the names could be different. My biggest motivation for this is to allow a user to give more descriptive names to the metrics in the web front-end without the PHP code having to figure it out. It also would eliminate the problem of constant metric names or gmetric labels that are too long and mess up the web interface. Just thought I would throw out the idea for feedback before I get too deep into the implementation.
Thoughts? Brad ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Ganglia-developers mailing list Ganglia-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ganglia-developers
