Scripting in metrics with Splunk?

[daniel333]

All,

Still getting my head around metrics. I shameless stole this line of bash and setup metrics and it's working . UI was cool.

echo "mydesktop.cpu.util:$intCount|c" | nc -w 1 -u myheavyforwarders.domain.com 8125

With this in mind how would I send more than one metric? Say I wanted all the output of TOP? Can you send more than one metric at a time? I understand these metric can have dimension, is that basically an array of values?

[rjthibod]

As @richgalloway said in hist comment, in 7.0.0, you can only send one _value and one measurement in each metric event, but theoretically you can have as many dimensions (columns/tags/fields) as you want.

You could parse top output and send each row separately with the same timestamp. Each column would be a dimension but you would need to determine what you are sending as the _value field in this case. Not really sure what the point of this would be, but it is doable.

[richgalloway]

As I understand metrics, each "event" is a single value. Dimensions describe the value - process ID, user running the process, etc.