Publishing mterics to ganglia using gmetric4j

Question

I'm considering using gmetric4j to publish metrics to ganglia. So far the only documented way I found for doing this is to use it's GSampler class to make a Metric data polling Runnable that runs at scheduled times.

In my application, though, it would be easier to have it's components themselves publish the metric data when they see fit (i.e. not in regular scheduled intervals). From inspecting the gmetric4j source code I can see that this can be done with GMetric objects, but I am not sure if this would produce the meaningful results in the end.

So what I would like to know is:

Can you publish data to ganglia at irregular intervals, and if yes how are data aggregations and time series formed in this case?

Also I failed to understand the meaning of "tmax" (-x on command line) and "dmax" (-d on command line) parameters of gmetric calls and if they have anything to do with the above problem. Does anyone know anything more about these?

Answer 1

Have you tried the Metrics Library? It has a Ganglia reporter that takes care of when and how to send your measurements to gmond/gmetad. You can also check out the source if you want a code example.

For dmax, tmax, and how often to report, I found this to be a good source