Collecting and plotting the uptime is pointless

[Simon Déziel]

Collecting and plotting the uptime seems pointless as this gives no valuable information. Enabling this plugin by default when installing munin-node will waste resources when polling all nodes and also when generating graphs. I think the default setup should not enable this plugin. Of course, this is a "wishlist" item.

If I missed the point completely and graphing the uptime is useful I'd like to know why/how.

# lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS
Release: 12.04

# apt-cache policy munin-node
munin-node:
  Installed: 1.4.6-3ubuntu3.1
  Candidate: 1.4.6-3ubuntu3.1
  Version table:
 *** 1.4.6-3ubuntu3.1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.4.6-3ubuntu3 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main i386 Packages

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: munin-node 1.4.6-3ubuntu3.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-32.51-virtual 3.2.30
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-32-virtual i686
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu14
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Oct 18 23:26:10 2012
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=linux
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: munin
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Kenyon Ralph (kralph)]

To me, the usefulness comes from the longer-term graphs (week, month, year) which show you how stable the system is and the average uptime. It is also a good check of munin's network connectivity, as any network problems will appear as obvious breaks in the graph.

[Simon Déziel (sdeziel)]

On 12-10-19 01:07 AM, Kenyon Ralph wrote:
> To me, the usefulness comes from the longer-term graphs (week, month,
> year) which show you how stable the system is and the average uptime. It
> is also a good check of munin's network connectivity, as any network
> problems will appear as obvious breaks in the graph.

Thanks for the explanation. IMHO that still doesn't worth enabling it by
default but I agree this have some usefulness (other than drawing
triangles).

[Robie Basak (racb)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

Based on Kenyon's feedback, I'm not sure that there is a clear reason to go either way. So I don't think it makes sense for Ubuntu to arbitrarily operate differently from Debian on this point, and it is easier to keep the behaviour the same as Debian. Would you like to file a bug with Debian to see what they say about it? If the Debian maintainer agrees with and makes this change, then Ubuntu will end up picking it up unless there's a good reason not to (and I don't see one).

I think it would be misleading to leave this bug open as that would imply that Ubuntu may change the behaviour in the future. So I'm marking this as Won't Fix, but please note that this applies to an Ubuntu delta only. We can still track a separate Debian status in this bug, and if Debian changes the behaviour, it will in all likelyhood be picked up by Ubuntu at the next merge.