Memory Statistics

Plugin: proc.plugin Module: /proc/vmstat

Overview

Linux Virtual memory subsystem.

Information about memory management, indicating how effectively the kernel allocates and frees memory resources in response to system demands.

Monitors page faults, which occur when a process requests a portion of its memory that isn't immediately available. Monitoring these events can help diagnose inefficiencies in memory management and provide insights into application behavior.

Tracks swapping activity — a vital aspect of memory management where the kernel moves data from RAM to swap space, and vice versa, based on memory demand and usage. It also monitors the utilization of zswap, a compressed cache for swap pages, and provides insights into its usage and performance implications.

In the context of virtualized environments, it tracks the ballooning mechanism which is used to balance memory resources between host and guest systems.

For systems using NUMA architecture, it provides insights into the local and remote memory accesses, which can impact the performance based on the memory access times.

The collector also watches for 'Out of Memory' kills, a drastic measure taken by the system when it runs out of memory resources.

This collector is only supported on the following platforms:

• linux

This collector only supports collecting metrics from a single instance of this integration.

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 Memory Statistics instance

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
mem.swapio	in, out	KiB/s
system.pgpgio	in, out	KiB/s
system.pgfaults	minor, major	faults/s
mem.balloon	inflate, deflate, migrate	KiB/s
mem.zswapio	in, out	KiB/s
mem.ksm_cow	swapin, write	KiB/s
mem.thp_faults	alloc, fallback, fallback_charge	events/s
mem.thp_file	alloc, fallback, mapped, fallback_charge	events/s
mem.thp_zero	alloc, failed	events/s
mem.thp_collapse	alloc, failed	events/s
mem.thp_split	split, failed, split_pmd, split_deferred	events/s
mem.thp_swapout	swapout, fallback	events/s
mem.thp_compact	success, fail, stall	events/s
mem.oom_kill	kills	kills/s
mem.numa	local, foreign, interleave, other, pte_updates, huge_pte_updates, hint_faults, hint_faults_local, pages_migrated	events/s

Alerts

The following alerts are available:

Alert name	On metric	Description
30min_ram_swapped_out	mem.swapio	percentage of the system RAM swapped in the last 30 minutes
oom_kill	mem.oom_kill	number of out of memory kills in the last 30 minutes

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

File

There is no configuration file.

Options

There are no configuration options.

Examples

There are no configuration examples.