mpstat/sar cpu: different placement of column %steal

[Pitterling]

Hi,

column ordering for sar CPU and mpstat is different (%steal is placed behind %irq %soft)

mpstat

16:14:48 CPU %usr %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %guest %gnice %idle

sar -C

16:14:48 CPU %usr %nice %sys %iowait %steal %irq %soft %guest %gnice %idle

Any reason? A parser has to distinct between both formats.

thx

[sysstat]

No real reason for that, except historical one.
I can probably change column ordering for mpstat output. Anyway it would be better to rely on JSON output format (also available for mpstat since version 11.5.1) instead of parsing the command's plain output which may be subject to change.

[Pitterling]

I mainly deal with the big distributions SLES/RHEL. Their recent versions just started to use 10.2 ... it will probably take a while before 11.5.1+ will be part of their standard delivery.

Thanks for the tip with JSON format. Does that mean, that the standard historical data collection will also collect JSON output?

Finally, there is no urgent need to align the column ordering .. your decision.

Thx

[sysstat]

mpstat uses its standard output format or the JSON output format depending on whether option "-o JSON" has been entered on the command line or not.
Wrt sar, data are collected and stored in datafiles in binary format (/var/log/sa/saDD). You can use sadf to display their contents in specific formats like JSON. See sadf(1) manual page.

[Pitterling]

thx .. i was more referring to the crontab configuration creating the daily activity reporting (sarXX textfiles)

All examples still use "sa2 -A" only to create the daily activity file ... is that something you consider to change to the JSON output?

[sysstat]

So maybe it would be useful for the user to have a mean to choose the output format for daily reports (plain text, JSON, XML...) ? I will think about that...
Thanks.