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Status Planned for future release
Workspace Instana
Categories Alert
Created by Guest
Created on May 7, 2024

Need to be able to threshold using COUNT even if the object is NOT an entity

Currently, Instana allows you to use a COUNT evaluation within the system rules.  This allows customers to COUNT entities that meet a certain criteria.   For example, count the number of processes that are running.

 

But, there are number of customer use cases where customers want to use a COUNT on data that is NOT an entity.   For example, COUNT filesystems, count files in a directory, etc.   Here are a few use cases that I got from existing ITM v6 customers that use COUNT:

  • Count the number of files in a directory.    File and directory monitoring is being added to the Host sensor.
  • Within the Oracle sensor, count the number of Listeners that are running
  • Some customers want to do a count on filesystems
  • Count the number of connections to a port/socket via the OS Agent
  • We have one customer that brings in custom data.  They then do a COUNT on the number of rows of data returned.  Since it is custom, I don't know what the data is.
Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    May 16, 2024

    I talked to Team Infra about the above. 

    > Count the number of files in a directory. File and directory monitoring is being added to the Host sensor.

    Due to the fact that file/directory monitoring is not even present yet, and there are multiple open questions of how this would event look like, I'm not considering this so far. And leave that for the future once Instana collects such information.

    > Within the Oracle sensor, count the number of Listeners that are running

    If such a count-metric of the Oracle sensor is missing, it could be added. Then, events/alerts can be created. However, I don't even see that we are collecting any information related to the "listeners". That would be the prerequisite for that.

    > Some customers want to do a count on filesystems

    The number of file systems could be exposed as a metric. 

    > Count the number of connections to a port/socket via the OS Agent

    That sounds like a new metric that needs to be added by the Host plugin?

    > We have one customer that brings in custom data.  They then do a COUNT on the number of rows of data returned.  Since it is custom, I don't know what the data is.

    I think such would need to be ingested my the customer as a metric. Such as using statsd. Otherwise that custom data does not seem to be available to Instana itself. 

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    May 16, 2024

    For all the above, the respective plugin/sensor needs to expose each of the above as a metric. Once that is done, these metrics can be used for Alerting in both Custom Events and Infra Smart Alerts.