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PMTA knowledge base›Metric§ 5.3

Traffic counters

Total / Last Hour / Last Minute
Total, hour and minute — three windows onto the same data

Recipients, messages and kilobytes for all time, for the last hour and for the last minute.

The three windows answer different questions: the total — how much in all, the hour — what the usual load is, the minute — what is happening now. Substituting one for another means answering the wrong question.

The all-time value grows from the engine’s start and is reset by a restart — you cannot judge a period by it if the node was ever restarted.

The main trap is taking a snapshot for a history. The metric describes the moment of polling. Everything that happened between two measurements and managed to end will not get into either of them. For events there is accounting, for state — these numbers.
What the Hub does. It collects it — node polling takes this metric from the status snapshot and stores it in its time series.

The all-time value grows from the engine’s start and is reset by a restart — you cannot judge a period by it if the node was ever restarted.

Recommended values

What to compare with:

Value Compared with
current value the usual one for this node, not the neighboring one
peak the ceiling, if there is one
growth the growth rate, not the absolute number

Fleet nodes are not directly comparable: they have different hardware, different addresses and a different mix of receivers. It makes sense to compare a node with itself over time.

The comparison advice is ours. From the manual here come the metric’s composition and its units of measurement.
Example configuration
# the metric comes in the status snapshot
curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8080/status?format=json"pmta show status
The highlighted line returns the snapshot as a structure — that is how the Hub’s polling reads it. The line below prints the same thing in the console.
yellow — — directive names, blue — blocks. They are highlighted the same way in the text of the card.
Compatibility
PowerMTA 6.0
described in the manual of this version · platform: any
The vendor does not state the first version for every directive — there is no note here. The name also appears in the 5.0 edition of the manual.
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Related entries

4 relations

Works together with

Throughput peaksThe same set of values, only with the highest values instead of the current ones. § 5.3

Can be replaced by

The telemetry contractA second account of the same traffic — per message rather than in summary numbers. inference

Affects

Reset the countersThe documented way to reset these counters. § 6.3.6

Where you can see it

The whole node state in one documentThe metric comes in the status snapshot — with the same request as all the others. § 5.3

Referenced from

Node status in the consoleThe metric the command prints. § 6.3.17

How to check on the node
The metric is viewed together with the neighboring ones — on its own any number means little:
pmta show status
pmta show queues --sort=rcpt --maxitems=20
The first prints all node metrics at once. The second breaks down by queue what the first gives as one number — and that is usually where you can see which queue made it up.
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What else to read

3 articles

◇Exposing metrics to a collectorExposing the node’s metrics to an external collector in its format.◇The activation key is a prerequisite for installation, not a step after itWithout an activation key from SparkPost support the engine neither installs nor runs, and the license tier sets the outbound connection ceiling: on Standard everything above 200 is ignored.◇What the node tells about itself and through which channelsSeven observation surfaces: the web monitor, the console in four formats, the log, accounting, accounting search, metrics and export to external analytics.

In the Hub
Cost of a mistake
safe: a wrong value breaks nothing
Scenarios
Capacity planning · Collect telemetry