Sysctl as a Service, or: making sysctl(3) more friendly for monitoring systems

[Slawa Olhovchenkov]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 08:16:57AM -0800, Mark Rushakoff wrote:

> In Prometheus' node_exporter, it looks like they're calling sysctl to grab
> just
> CPU or just memory, etc., metrics.
> 
> On the InfluxDB side of things, I'm not seeing any Telegraf plugin to
> monitor
> sysctl in a generic way, although you could probably emit InfluxDB line
> protocol pretty easily from the exporter tool or something similar to that.
> 
> My impression, from a monitoring perspective, is that there isn't much
> demand
> to gather _everything_ in sysctl in a single call, although categorized
> subsets
> might be appealing.

Many sysctl nodes have

a) opaque binary values, w/ version depended formats
b) opaque binary values w/ size more then values
c) very large size: sysctl -b kern.msgbuf|wc
   10200   55998 1048505

Also, InfluxDB is hipster shit and for many cases need to preprocess
collected values, because imposible to calculate on Influx side.