Convert value to absolute value for clock drift monitor

Setup a Linux -NTP clock drift monitor which is working fine. We have seen the monitor post negative numbers as well as positive numbers for time different depending on if the Linux server is ahead or behind the NTP time.

So this leads to the question of alerting; will the monitor alert trigger if the threshold is + or - x number of seconds, or just a positive number? If not, is there a data conversion that can be used to convert the statistic to absolute value? Absolute value was not listed as an option @ https://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/en/flarehelp/sam/content/sam-available-data-transformations-sw3954.htm, but ideally we can alert on a time difference whether positive or negative.

thanks!

Find more posts tagged with

sam

Linux

drift

ntp

Accepted answers

All comments

bslobodn

any thoughts out there? Still interested in solving this.

bslobodn

any thoughts out there? Still interested in solving this.

stevenstadel

The Server Clock Drift PowerShell template uses an if-then technique to make sure the result is positive. The clock_drift is less than 0 then multiply it by -1 to turn it positive. Adding something similar to your Linux script may work.

----$clock_drift=$server_time-$local_time;
if ($clock_drift -lt 0)
{
$clock_drift=$clock_drift*(-1);
$symbol=$clock_drift;
}

----

bslobodn

Thank you for the response Steven, this template uses Perl but I will try to apply the same logic.

Still hoping Solarwinds can provide a data transformation for absolute value, but perhaps I need to submit this as a feature request to get a response.

Bill

bslobodn

I did open a case for this, and Solarwinds will submit a feature request to add absolute value to the Data Transformation options.

As for the script I did make a couple modifications to the last section of the script to allow an absolute value to be reported:

if ($out[0] =~ ", offset ") {
@str=split(" ",$out[0]);
$off= $str[5];

#### Created parameter to convert $off to absolute value ####
$off2= abs($str[5]);
$serv=$str[1];
chop($off);
printf ("Message: NTP server %s time offset %.3f sec.\n",$serv,$off);

#### changed statistic value to use the $off2 parameter ####
printf ("Statistic: %.3f\n",$off2);
exit 0;
}