System Metrics

System metrics form the default and recommended monitoring baseline in BlazeBee. These collectors provide essential visibility into system health, performance, and resource utilization with minimal overhead.

They are suitable for continuous operation in production environments.

Purpose

This page documents the standard collectors that:

• Are enabled in typical deployments
• Have low performance impact
• Cover the most common operational needs

Core System Collectors

Uptime

Collector name: uptime

• Reports system uptime in seconds
• Derived from kernel uptime sources

Use cases:

• Detecting reboots
• Correlating restarts with incidents

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Load Average

Collector name: load_average

• Reports 1, 5, and 15 minute load averages
• Kernel-derived metrics

Use cases:

• Capacity planning
• Detecting sustained overload

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CPU

Collector name: cpu

• Per-core and aggregated CPU usage
• User, system, idle, iowait breakdown

Use cases:

• Performance analysis
• Detecting CPU saturation

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Memory (RAM)

Collector name: ram

• Total, used, free, cached memory
• Swap usage (if available)

Use cases:

• Memory leak detection
• Capacity monitoring

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Disk

Collector name: disk

• Disk usage per mount point
• Read/write statistics

Use cases:

• Storage capacity tracking
• IO bottleneck detection

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Network

Collector name: network

• Per-interface RX/TX counters
• Packet and error statistics

Use cases:

• Traffic analysis
• Detecting packet loss

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Processes

Collector name: processes

• Total running processes
• Blocked and zombie counts

Use cases:

• Detecting process leaks
• OS-level health checks

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Context Switches

Collector name: vmstat

• Voluntary and involuntary context switches
• Kernel scheduler activity

Use cases:

• Diagnosing contention
• Performance tuning

Enabling System Metrics

System collectors are enabled using the same configuration mechanism:

[[metrics.collectors.enabled]]
name = "cpu"
[metrics.collectors.enabled.metadata]
topic  = "metrics/cpu"
qos    = 0
retain = true

Most system metrics are included in the standard feature set.

Usage Scenarios

• Baseline infrastructure monitoring
• Alerting on thresholds (CPU, RAM, disk)
• Feeding dashboards and time-series databases
• Supporting SRE incident response

Summary

System metrics provide reliable, low-cost observability into operating system behavior. They are the foundation of BlazeBee deployments and should be enabled in nearly all environments.