DalmatinerDB stores metrics in a periodic fashion, so for every second that passes (assuming your buckets are set up to have a 1s resolution) either a “received” metric’s value or a “non-received” metric is written to the database.

When you miss writing a metric, DalmatinerDB does not write a ‘0’ but it does write an explicit ‘non-value’. This has multiple advantages, not only is it very nice for data compression (ZFS handles zero blocks very well), but it also allows us to differentiate between the two for a specific period.

Version 0.2.0 of DalmatinerDB (the current development branch) will include a confidence function which helps to examine how confident DalmatinerDB can be with a given value or aggregate, let’s look at it using an [Read more…]