Edit: since I wrote this I discovered that units of "B" have a divisor of 1024 but that other units such as "Bytes" have a divisor of 1000. I changed my units to "Bytes" instead of "B" and now it reports correct numbers. But that's really confusing behavior. Thanks, Kevin
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It's nice that Zabbix automatically converts units on big numbers such as B to MB or GB. But 1024 is the wrong divisor to use in every case except RAM. There needs to be a way to specify a units divisor of 1000 instead of 1024.
Disk space is always measured by the manufacturers with a divisor of 1000. Only for RAM, and for some software, does K mean 1024.
The problem gets worse for bigger number due to repeated division.
For example, we have NAS storage which reports a size of 8388016408 kBytes. That's 8.388 TB. If I use the correct multiplier of 1000 and specify units in "B", Zabbix will divide by 1024 4 times, and report a size of 7.63 TB. If I use a multiplier of 1024, as some suggest, Zabbix will report 7.81 TB.
If I knew that Zabbix will always do a certain number of divisions, I could compensate with a custom multiplier. But that's really hokey, and it doesn't help if I don't know how many divisions will occur, such as disk space used.
Maybe there is already a way to do this, but if so I haven't found it.
Please consider this for a future release.
Thanks, Kevin
***************
It's nice that Zabbix automatically converts units on big numbers such as B to MB or GB. But 1024 is the wrong divisor to use in every case except RAM. There needs to be a way to specify a units divisor of 1000 instead of 1024.
Disk space is always measured by the manufacturers with a divisor of 1000. Only for RAM, and for some software, does K mean 1024.
The problem gets worse for bigger number due to repeated division.
For example, we have NAS storage which reports a size of 8388016408 kBytes. That's 8.388 TB. If I use the correct multiplier of 1000 and specify units in "B", Zabbix will divide by 1024 4 times, and report a size of 7.63 TB. If I use a multiplier of 1024, as some suggest, Zabbix will report 7.81 TB.
If I knew that Zabbix will always do a certain number of divisions, I could compensate with a custom multiplier. But that's really hokey, and it doesn't help if I don't know how many divisions will occur, such as disk space used.
Maybe there is already a way to do this, but if so I haven't found it.
Please consider this for a future release.
Thanks, Kevin
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