Intel RDT Input Plugin

This plugin collects information provided by monitoring features of the Intel Resource Director Technology, a hardware framework to monitor and control the utilization of shared resources (e.g. last level cache, memory bandwidth).

Intel’s Resource Director Technology (RDT) framework consists of:

Cache Monitoring Technology (CMT)
Memory Bandwidth Monitoring (MBM)
Cache Allocation Technology (CAT)
Code and Data Prioritization (CDP)

As multithreaded and multicore platform architectures emerge, the last level cache and memory bandwidth are key resources to manage for running workloads in single-threaded, multithreaded, or complex virtual machine environments. Intel introduces CMT, MBM, CAT and CDP to manage these workloads across shared resources.

⭐ Telegraf v1.16.0 🏷️ hardware, system 💻 linux, freebsd, macos

Requirements

The plugin requires the pqos cli tool in version 4.0+ to be installed and configured to work in OS Interface mode. The tool is part of the Intel(R) RDT Software Package.

[!IMPORTANT] The pqos binary needs to run as root. If telegraf is not running as root you need to enable sudo for pqos and set the use_sudo option to true.

To setup pqos correctly check the installation guide. For help on how to configure the tool visit the wiki and read the resource control documentation

Service Input

This plugin is a service input. Normal plugins gather metrics determined by the interval setting. Service plugins start a service to listens and waits for metrics or events to occur. Service plugins have two key differences from normal plugins:

The global or plugin specific interval setting may not apply
The CLI options of --test, --test-wait, and --once may not produce output for this plugin

Global configuration options

In addition to the plugin-specific configuration settings, plugins support additional global and plugin configuration settings. These settings are used to modify metrics, tags, and field or create aliases and configure ordering, etc. See the CONFIGURATION.md for more details.

Configuration

# Read Intel RDT metrics
# This plugin ONLY supports non-Windows
[[inputs.intel_rdt]]
  ## Optionally set sampling interval to Nx100ms.
  ## This value is propagated to pqos tool. Interval format is defined by pqos itself.
  ## If not provided or provided 0, will be set to 10 = 10x100ms = 1s.
  # sampling_interval = "10"

  ## Optionally specify the path to pqos executable.
  ## If not provided, auto discovery will be performed.
  # pqos_path = "/usr/local/bin/pqos"

  ## Optionally specify if IPC and LLC_Misses metrics shouldn't be propagated.
  ## If not provided, default value is false.
  # shortened_metrics = false

  ## Specify the list of groups of CPU core(s) to be provided as pqos input.
  ## Mandatory if processes aren't set and forbidden if processes are specified.
  ## e.g. ["0-3", "4,5,6"] or ["1-3,4"]
  # cores = ["0-3"]

  ## Specify the list of processes for which Metrics will be collected.
  ## Mandatory if cores aren't set and forbidden if cores are specified.
  ## e.g. ["qemu", "pmd"]
  # processes = ["process"]

  ## Specify if the pqos process should be called with sudo.
  ## Mandatory if the telegraf process does not run as root.
  # use_sudo = false

Troubleshooting

Pointing to non-existing cores will lead to throwing an error by pqos and the plugin will not work properly. Be sure to check provided core number exists within desired system.

Be aware, reading Intel RDT metrics by pqos cannot be done simultaneously on the same resource. Do not use any other pqos instance that is monitoring the same cores or PIDs within the working system. It is not possible to monitor same cores or PIDs on different groups.

PIDs associated for the given process could be manually checked by pidof command. E.g:

pidof PROCESS

where PROCESS is process name.

Metrics

Name	Full name	Description
MBL	Memory Bandwidth on Local NUMA Node	Memory bandwidth utilization by the relevant CPU core/process on the local NUMA memory channel
MBR	Memory Bandwidth on Remote NUMA Node	Memory bandwidth utilization by the relevant CPU core/process on the remote NUMA memory channel
MBT	Total Memory Bandwidth	Total memory bandwidth utilized by a CPU core/process on local and remote NUMA memory channels
LLC	L3 Cache Occupancy	Total Last Level Cache occupancy by a CPU core/process
LLC_Misses*	L3 Cache Misses	Total Last Level Cache misses by a CPU core/process
IPC*	Instructions Per Cycle	Total instructions per cycle executed by a CPU core/process

*optional

Example Output

rdt_metric,cores=12\,19,host=r2-compute-20,name=IPC,process=top value=0 1598962030000000000
rdt_metric,cores=12\,19,host=r2-compute-20,name=LLC_Misses,process=top value=0 1598962030000000000
rdt_metric,cores=12\,19,host=r2-compute-20,name=LLC,process=top value=0 1598962030000000000
rdt_metric,cores=12\,19,host=r2-compute-20,name=MBL,process=top value=0 1598962030000000000
rdt_metric,cores=12\,19,host=r2-compute-20,name=MBR,process=top value=0 1598962030000000000
rdt_metric,cores=12\,19,host=r2-compute-20,name=MBT,process=top value=0 1598962030000000000

# README