[Dovecot] interesting stats pattern

[Ron Leach]

On 29/05/2012 19:13, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 29.5.2012, at 21.03, Cor Bosman wrote:
>
>> yes, I am getting a list of sessions/users every 5 minutes through
>> cron. Im already using "doveadm stats dump session/user
>> connected"
>
> Actually that's not really correct behaviour either, since it
> ignores all the connections that happened during the 5 minutes if
> they don't exist at the time when you're asking for them. I'm not
> sure what the most correct way to do this kind of a graph would be
> :)
>

Just to share in case it helps, what we do in telecommunications 
equipment is to count both:

- sessions (a simple increment, sometimes termed 'peg-counts')

- session-seconds (a cumulative measure of the number of seconds that
all sessions have endured during the reporting period)

Sometimes, for an analysis, the 'transaction rate' is important - so 
the session counts are helpful.

Other times, we want to know the overall demand for 'active presence' 
(actually, telephone call occupancy in our industry) so that we deploy 
sufficient equipment for the total 'presence' needed, irrespective of 
whatever the join/logoff rate might be.

If the Doveadm report is sufficiently frequent, then might these two 
measures help to capture the picture?

Ron