Inter Process Communication icon

Inter Process Communication

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.

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

File

There is no configuration file.

Options

There are no configuration options.

Examples

There are no configuration examples.

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

Get Netdata

Sign up for free

Want to see a demonstration of Netdata for multiple use cases?

Go to Live Demo