Timex

Plugin: timex.plugin Module: timex.plugin

Overview

Examine Timex metrics to gain insights into system clock operations. Study time sync status, clock drift, and adjustments to ensure accurate system timekeeping.

It uses system call adjtimex on Linux and ntp_adjtime on FreeBSD or Mac to monitor the system kernel clock synchronization state.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector supports collecting metrics from multiple instances of this integration, including remote instances.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

This integration doesn't support auto-detection.

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per Timex instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
system.clock_sync_state	state	state
system.clock_status	unsync, clockerr	status
system.clock_sync_offset	offset	milliseconds

Alerts

The following alerts are available:

Alert name	On metric	Description
system_clock_sync_state	system.clock_sync_state	when set to 0, the system kernel believes the system clock is not properly synchronized to a reliable server

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

Options

At least one option ('clock synchronization state', 'time offset') needs to be enabled for this collector to run.

Config options

Option	Description	Default	Required
update every	Data collection frequency.	1	no
clock synchronization state	Make chart showing system clock synchronization state.	yes	yes
time offset	Make chart showing computed time offset between local system and reference clock	yes	yes

via File

The configuration file name for this integration is netdata.conf. Configuration for this specific integration is located in the [plugin:timex] section within that file.

The file format is a modified INI syntax. The general structure is:

[section1]
    option1 = some value
    option2 = some other value

[section2]
    option3 = some third value

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config netdata.conf

Examples

Basic

A basic configuration example.

Config

[plugin:timex]
  update every = 1
  clock synchronization state = yes
  time offset = yes