What is it?
Apart from blocking threats over the network, IPFire analyses traffic, monitors throughput, latency, system stats and many things more. Before, IPFire has relied on collectd which no longer seems to be a good fit for us.
Instead, we will write a new system from scratch that will determine the state of the system and collect as many metrics as possible for admins to view and investigate system performance and problems.
Who is working on it?
Current Status
- Targeted Release: Core Update 202
- Tracker Bug: None
Description
Benefits to IPFire
IPFire relies on good metrics. Making changes to the configuration of a system that is under high load requires that admins can analyse the state of the system. collectd is a great all-round solution, but not tailored well enough to the needs of IPFire. On top of that, the project appears to be nearly unmaintained.
The current graphs that are shown in the web UI of IPFire give a rough overview, but lack detail. They are also hard to read, not really pretty and therefore fail to send a clear message to the viewer. We need graphs that allow the admins to grasp in a fraction of a second what is going on.
The design of telemetryd would also become much more modern and consume less system resources. Especially when it comes to writes, collectd is generating a lot of wear to the disk. However, we have configured it to only collect a minimum of data which does not help with generating meaningful graphs.
Impact
There should only be benefits to migrating away from collectd. However, we will have to migrate any existing data from the collectd format into telemetryd format.
Documentation
Feedback
None, yet
Dependencies
None
Release Notes
None, yet