Detailed system and process monitoring
Never got the hang of telegraf, it was all too easy to cook my own monitoring...
Humble Beginnings
In fact, when I started building detailed process monitoring I knew nothing about telegraf, influxdb, grafana or even Raspberry Pi computers.
It was back in 2017, when pondering whether to build my next PC around an Intel Core i7-6950X or an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, that I started looking into measuring CPU usage of a specific process. I wanted to better see and understand whether more (but slower) CPU cores would be a better investment than faster (but fewer) CPU cores.
At the time my PC had a
AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE C3
with 4 cores at 3.4GHz, and I had no idea how often those CPU
cores were all used to their full extent. To learn more about
the possibilities (and limitations) of fully
multi-threading CPU-bound applications, I started running
top commands in a loop and dumping lines in .csv files to
then plot charts in Google Sheets. This was very crude, but
it did show the difference between rendering a video in
Blender (not multi-threaded) compared to using the
pulverize tool to
fully multi-thread the same task:
This early ad-hoc effort resulted in a few scripts to measure per-proccess CPU usage, overall CPU with thermals, and even GPU usage.