The problem with what you're proposing is you're getting an invalid picture of data over time. This is the problem with the original smokeping program that the smokeping prober is trying to solve.
The original smokeping software does exactly what you're talking about. It sends out a burst of 10 packets at the configured interval (in your example, 1 minute). The problem is this does not give you a real picture, because the packets are not evenly spaced. This is why I made the smokeping_prober work the way it does. It sends a regular stream, but captures the data in a smarter way, as a histogram. >From the histogram data you can only collect the metrics every minute, and generate the same "min / max / avg / dev / loss" values that you're looking for. But the actual values are much more statistically valid, as it's measuring evenly over time. On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 3:17 PM Marcelo Magallón < marcelo.magal...@grafana.com> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 5:15 PM Stuart Clark <stuart.cl...@jahingo.com> > wrote: > >> > Thoughts? >> >> Is there any reason you can't use the Blackbox Exporter as it currently >> is, just decreasing the scrape interval? Prometheus can scrape as >> infrequently as every 2 minutes or as frequently as several times a >> second. >> > > Thanks Stuart, > > Decreasing the scope interval with blackbox_exporter would cause it to > behave more like smokeping_prober, which is not exactly the thing I'm after. > > Also, smokeping_prober creates histograms from the observations, so even > if you set up an ICMP check with blackbox_exporter using a very short > interval, you wouldn't get the same information from it. > > To provide a concrete example, in terms of timestamps, with > smokeping_prober you send packets at 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, > ... (1 packet every second, with the scrape interval be say 60 seconds). > > With current blackbox_exporter you could do something similar by setting > the scrape interval to 1 second, but you'd get slightly different > information. > > With what I'm proposing you'd send packets at say 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 60, 61, > 62, 63, 64, 120, 121, 122, 123, 123, ... (5 packets within 5 seconds, then > wait for 55 seconds, send another 5 packets in 5 seconds, etc; the scrape > interval would be 60 seconds) > > -- > Marcelo Magallón > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Prometheus Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to prometheus-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/CABbyFmqeHRJDX_2VC-AYib85uJm378OCd4EX66TYoe7%3D_nng0w%40mail.gmail.com.
