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Check load

Overview

On the No Sheep blog, Zachary Tirrell defines the load average on GNU/Linux operating system:

In short it is the average sum of the number of processes waiting in the run-queue plus the number currently executing over 1, 5, and 15 minutes time periods.

Alerts on load average are only set on 15 minutes time period. For this, the check gets the number of CPU cores to normalize load values automatically. Loads are computed by dividing the 15 minutes average load per CPU(s) count. For example, if you have 3 CPUs and the 15 minutes load is 6.0, then you get a warning because of (6 / 3) >= 1.15, where 1.15 is the default warning threshold. Main advantage of this method is to make machines comparable and making the design of Grafana panels easier.

Fact Sheet

Fact Value
Check Plugin Download https://github.com/Linuxfabrik/monitoring-plugins/tree/main/check-plugins/load
Check Interval Recommendation Once a minute
Can be called without parameters Yes
Compiled for Windows No
3rd Party Python modules psutil

Help

usage: load [-h] [-V] [--always-ok] [-c CRIT] [-w WARN]

Return the average system load per CPU over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes. In
short, "load" is the average sum of the number of processes waiting in the
run-queue plus the number currently executing over 1, 5, and 15 minute time
periods.

options:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  -V, --version        show program's version number and exit
  --always-ok          Always returns OK.
  -c, --critical CRIT  Set the critical threshold for load15 per CPU. Default:
                       5.0
  -w, --warning WARN   Set the warning threshold for load15 per CPU. Default:
                       1.15

Usage Examples

./load --warning 1.15 --critical 5.0

Output:

Avg per CPU: 0.11 0.12 0.09

States

  • WARN if load15 >= 1.15 (default)
  • CRIT if load15 >= 5.00 (default)

Perfdata / Metrics

Name Type Description
load1 Number load1
load5 Number load5
load15 Number load15

A value below 1 indicates satisfactory resource utilization and minimal wait times. A value above 1 indicates resource saturation and some amount of processing delay.

Credits, License