[smokeping-users] Relation between step, pings and graphs

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Michal,

On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, Peter Kristolaitis wrote:

> Step = how many seconds each round of polling lasts
> Pings = how many pings are sent to each target during each step
> 
> In terms of relation to RRD,
> 1 step = 1 data point in the RRD file
> 
> Note that you should set the values such that you can ping each target 
> on your network 'pings' times within 'step' seconds, otherwise you will 
> end up with blank data points in your graph.
> 
> For my production setup, I use step = 180, pings = 20.  In practice this 
> means that each data point in the RRD file/graph represents a 3-minute 
> timespan with aggregate data from 20 ping results.

Just to add a bit more to this: the default interval between pings is 1 
second. Unless you hack the FPing.pm to change this, that means that 3 
pings will take 3 seconds, and therefore step must be greater than 3 (it 
might just about squeeze in with step = 3 but it will not be reliable).

Also you will not get a very good smoke effect with pings < 15. I'd 
recommend at least step = 60 and pings = 20.

Cheers, Chris.
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