[rrd-developers] RFC new DS type DGAUGE

[Tobias Oetiker]

Today Florian Forster wrote:

> 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.

interessting idea, I will meditate on this ...

thanks
tobi


>

-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
http://it.oetiker.ch tobi at oetiker.ch ++41 62 775 9902 / sb: -9900