[rrd-developers] RFC new DS type DGAUGE

[Florian Forster]

Hi Tobi,

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 03:56:15PM +0100, Tobias Oetiker wrote:
>  A new datasource type called DGAUGE. It would always *round down* the
>  timestamp to the last step.

a lot of people tell me: ``I don't want to see emails _per second_ but
the actual number of emails!''. When I then change the graph, so that
each value is multiplied by the length of one ``interval'', they tell me
it's confusing that a yearly graph shows much higher number than a daily
graph. All they want is to see the number of emails, jeez!

My point is, I'm not convinced it's good to give in to people who don't
understand the concept.

Maybe a good compromise would be to make this `now - (now % step)'
calculation easier, so people who know what they're doing can do it with
less pain. For this, we could add an alternative to the `N' time
specification, for example `B' as `Beginning of interval' or `S' as
`Step border'. An update would then become:

 $ rrdtool update "$FILE" B:1.23
 $ # - or -
 $ rrdtool update "$FILE" S:1.23

This does not work with multiple values per step. But, if people want to
update the file multiple times in one step _and_ want to get exactly the
value they put in, they certainly should get an error message or they
will really get confused.

Regards,
-octo
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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