System.swap.size vs system.swap.in/out

[JoelPettigrew]

This is kind of a repost from Monday...

I am pretty new to Linux and Unix. I walked into a position at a company that is using Zabbix to monitor percentage of system.swap.size. I was told that it might be a better indicator of problems by capturing system.swap.in/system.swap.out.

Any suggestions or explanations would be really appreciated.

Thanks!
Joel

[harmonica]

http://www.zabbix.com/documentation/...s/zabbix_agent

Swap in (from device into memory) statistics.
Swap out (from memory onto device) statistics.

"Swap-in and Swap-out is the transfer of the whole content from main memory to virtual memory and vice-versa."

[JoelPettigrew]

That does help quite a bit. Is there a benefit to monitoring in and out vs space? Seems like regardless of what you monitor it has to be in context. Like if you monitor sectors, what is a way to define how many sectors for how long is bad?
Are there good reasons to monitor in and out pages or sectors versus overall size as a percentage?

Thanks again!
Joel