Zabbix Interface Items History Storage

[jm123]

I'm working on calculating transfer values and throughput values +95ths and I'm having a hell of a time figuring out how zabbix is storing the things. Anyone have a part in this? It seems like chaos in the Database, but I trust the front end got it correct with the graphs.

I'm gonna work it out till I figure it, but I thought it was worth asking.

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My initial assumption was that all interfaces were being recorded like the following.

CISCO ifInOctets "bits"

host: ciscortr1
hostid: 10313
in_Name/key_: ge-1/1/9 - ifInOctets
in_itemid: 82140
out_name/key_: ge-1/1/9 - ifOutOctets
out_itemid: 82175
unit: bits

I know that ifInOctets is not actually, bits. It is bytes.
octet = byte, so it is mislabeled in the database.

My math takes the difference of bytes between points, the value column in history, then divides them by the difference in clock from the last record, to get bytes per second.

CISCO ifInOctets "bps"

host: ciscosw1
hostid: 1230
in_Name/key_: ifInOctets.FastEthernet0/24
in_itemid: 46216
out_Name/key_: ifOutOctets.FastEthernet0/24
out_itemid: 46376
unit: bps

Is this really bps (bits per second)? or is it Bps (Bytes per second)?

I have to do a reverse of the last example to get bits for each datapoint.

BROCADE snSwIfStatsInFrames
host: brocadesw1
hostid: 10431
in_Name/key_: snSwIfStatsInFrames[GigabitEthernet7/9]
in_itemid: 112683
out_Name/key_: ifOutOctets.FastEthernet0/24
out_itemid: 112731
unit: bps

Do I trust that this is bits per second or bytes. Frames have don't have the same size, why the hell would they choose frames as the unit in their snmp name?

Is zabbix dealing with all these variations programmatically when showing the graphs on the front. I'm also concerned with the amount of data I'll be chunking through trying find, store, and convert one way to another.

[kaspars.mednis]

As far as i know, units in Zabbix is just a description of an item value to make it more human readable, it has nothing to do with data transforming from bytes to bits

in zabbix pre3.4, there is a field named "multiplier", which will do specified calculation on item and store the calculated value in DB

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/3.2/manual/config/items/item

in zabbix 3.4 this i moved to preprocessing section in web interface

https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/3.4/manual/config/items/item

You must look at those multipliers, not units

regards,
Kaspars

[jm123]

Thanks, that helps a lot. I'll take a look at what I can do with it.

[jm123]

They all seem to be using 1 as their multiplier.

The only other multiplier I could find apart from 0 or 1 is 61.

Does this really mean that it is using the same algorithm for all of these interfaces that are using 1 as the multiplier? I'll have to check this against the graphs.

If this is the case, that would be very convenient. We're on version 3.2.7.

If this is true, then they are all actually bps and not bits between clock points at all.... Does that make sense?