netdata/collectors/proc.plugin/integrations/inter_process_communication.md

Inter Process Communication

Plugin: proc.plugin Module: ipc

Overview

IPC stands for Inter-Process Communication. It is a mechanism which allows processes to communicate with each other and synchronize their actions.

This collector exposes information about:

• Message Queues: This allows messages to be exchanged between processes. It's a more flexible method that allows messages to be placed onto a queue and read at a later time.

• Shared Memory: This method allows for the fastest form of IPC because processes can exchange data by reading/writing into shared memory segments.

• Semaphores: They are used to synchronize the operations performed by independent processes. So, if multiple processes are trying to access a single shared resource, semaphores can ensure that only one process accesses the resource at a given time.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector only supports collecting metrics from a single instance of this integration.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

This integration doesn't support auto-detection.

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per Inter Process Communication instance

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
system.ipc_semaphores	semaphores	semaphores
system.ipc_semaphore_arrays	arrays	arrays
system.message_queue_message	a dimension per queue	messages
system.message_queue_bytes	a dimension per queue	bytes
system.shared_memory_segments	segments	segments
system.shared_memory_bytes	bytes	bytes

Alerts

The following alerts are available:

Alert name	On metric	Description
semaphores_used	system.ipc_semaphores	IPC semaphore utilization
semaphore_arrays_used	system.ipc_semaphore_arrays	IPC semaphore arrays utilization

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

File

There is no configuration file.

Options

There are no configuration options.

Examples

There are no configuration examples.