# Metricbeat CPU information is wrong **URL:** \ **Category:** Beats\ **Tags:** metricbeat\ **Created:** [May 11, 2018, 4:20am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/metricbeat-cpu-information-is-wrong/131390 "2018-05-11T04:20:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![lserranov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3bc359/32.png) [@lserranov](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/lserranov)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2018, 4:20am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/metricbeat-cpu-information-is-wrong/131390/1 "2018-05-11T04:20:35Z")
Hello, I'm playing with ELK/Beats to learn and see what is out there. I deployed metricbeat and I can confirm that data is making its way to ELK (In particular I send info to logstash). I'm in kibana UI and I see information there but surprisingly the information is not what I expect. I was running load in the box to get: 0% CPU usage 50% CPU Usage 100% CPU Usage Or in other words, 0 Full CPU's used, 1 Full CPU used or 2 Full CPU's used. I put this load purposely to confirm if Kibana was going to show the number properly. I plotted a kibana visualization of system.processes.cpu.total.pct and also of system.cpu.total.pct. Somehow I see values of 0, 1 and 2 in the graphs, this is unexpected because I instead I was expecting values of 0%, 50% and 100%. So these metrics are not saying what total percentage of CPU is busy (0 to 100%), instead they say how many CPU's are used (0, 1 2). This is wrong and unexpected. I checked many other CPU related KPI's around and is the same luck. My OS is CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 Kernel Linux apache 3.10.0-693.el7.x86\_64 . The version of ELK is 6.2.4 (the latest) I have 2 CPU's: [root@apache metricbeat]# cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep -i proc processor : 0 processor : 1 [root@apache metricbeat]# And among other tests, when I made 1 CPU busy, VMSTAT was showing 50% CPU idle (50% busy): procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu----- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st 2 0 0 1007640 2116 551528 0 0 0 0 1080 93 50 0 50 0 0 1 0 0 1007640 2116 551528 0 0 0 0 1079 88 49 1 50 0 0 1 0 0 1007640 2116 551532 0 0 0 0 1091 113 50 0 50 0 0 1 0 0 1007640 2116 551532 0 0 0 0 1078 89 50 0 50 0 0 1 0 0 1007640 2116 551532 0 0 0 3 1079 93 50 0 50 0 0 1 0 0 1007640 2116 551532 0 0 0 0 1071 84 49 0 50 0 0 However the output in the console for metricbeat was showing: 2018-05-10T20:43:49.764-0700 DEBUG [logstash] logstash/async.go:142 17 events out of 17 events sent to logstash host 192.168.1.109:5443. Continue sending 2018-05-10T20:43:58.763-0700 DEBUG [publish] pipeline/processor.go:275 Publish event: { "@timestamp": "2018-05-11T03:43:58.762Z", "@metadata": { "beat": "metricbeat", "type": "doc", "version": "6.2.4" }, "metricset": { "name": "cpu", "module": "system", "rtt": 156 }, "system": { "cpu": { "cores": 2, "nice": { "pct": 0 }, "softirq": { "pct": 0.001 }, "user": { "pct": 0.9945 }, "idle": { "pct": 0.9965 }, "irq": { "pct": 0 }, "iowait": { "pct": 0 }, "steal": { "pct": 0 }, "system": { "pct": 0.008 }, "total": { "pct": 1.0035 } } }, "beat": { "version": "6.2.4", "name": "apache", "hostname": "apache" } } If you see, the raw data itself was showing Total pct of 1.0035 which is wrong. So looks like somewhere a factor of 50 is missing (1.0035% \* 50) = expected 50% usage. I noticed [Need to understand metricbeat cpu metrics](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/need-to-understand-metricbeat-cpu-metrics/130823), looks like somebody is seen same behavior. Can you please point me what to do here? Many thanks Luis ---
**Author:** ![kvch](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/kvch/32/72058_2.png) [@kvch](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/kvch)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2018, 9:46am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/metricbeat-cpu-information-is-wrong/131390/2 "2018-05-11T09:46:39Z")
The percentages are between 0..1, so 1.0035 equals 100.35%. CPU percentages reported by Metricbeat are not normalized by default. This means that Metricbeat sums the percentages of CPUs. You have 2 CPUs, so the percentages need to be divided by 2. If you do the math, you can see that 100.35%/2~50%. If you add `normalized_percentages` to your config, Metricbeat does the normalization for you: ```auto cpu.metrics: ["percentages", "normalized_percentages"] ``` ---
**Author:** ![lserranov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3bc359/32.png) [@lserranov](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/lserranov)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2018, 5:00pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/metricbeat-cpu-information-is-wrong/131390/3 "2018-05-11T17:00:45Z")
Hi @kvch, I did the change you suggested, I still see the system reporting in the scale of 1 instead of 100%: * * * 2018-05-11T09:58:55.199-0700 DEBUG [publish] pipeline/processor.go:275 Publish event: { "@timestamp": "2018-05-11T16:58:55.198Z", "@metadata": { "beat": "metricbeat", "type": "doc", "version": "6.2.4" }, "metricset": { "name": "cpu", "module": "system", "rtt": 172 }, "system": { "cpu": { "cores": 2, "system": { "pct": 0.007 }, "idle": { "pct": 0.9965 }, "nice": { "pct": 0 }, "softirq": { "pct": 0.001 }, "iowait": { "pct": 0 }, "steal": { "pct": 0 }, "total": { "pct": 1.0035 }, "irq": { "pct": 0 }, "user": { "pct": 0.9955 } } }, "beat": { "name": "apache", "hostname": "apache", "version": "6.2.4" } } 2018-05-11T09:58:55.201-0700 DEBUG [publish] pipeline/processor.go:275 Publish event: { "@timestamp": "2018-05-11T16:58:55.200Z", "@metadata": { "beat": "metricbeat", "type": "doc", "version": "6.2.4" }, "metricset": { "rtt": 125, "name": "cpu", "module": "system" }, "system": { "cpu": { "irq": { "pct": 0 }, "total": { "pct": 1.004 }, "idle": { "pct": 0.996 }, "nice": { "pct": 0 }, "softirq": { "pct": 0.001 }, "cores": 2, "system": { "pct": 0.007 }, "steal": { "pct": 0 }, "user": { "pct": 0.996 }, "iowait": { "pct": 0 } } }, "beat": { "name": "apache", "hostname": "apache", "version": "6.2.4" } } 2018-05-11T09:58:55.201-0700 DEBUG [publish] pipeline/processor.go:275 Publish event: { "@timestamp": "2018-05-11T16:58:55.201Z", "@metadata": { "beat": "metricbeat", "type": "doc", "version": "6.2.4" }, "metricset": { "module": "system", "rtt": 132, "name": "cpu" }, "system": { "cpu": { "idle": { "pct": 0.996, "norm": { "pct": 0.498 } }, "irq": { "pct": 0, "norm": { "pct": 0 } }, "nice": { "pct": 0, "norm": { "pct": 0 } }, "system": { "pct": 0.007, "norm": { "pct": 0.0035 } }, "iowait": { "norm": { "pct": 0 }, "pct": 0 }, "total": { "pct": 1.004, "norm": { "pct": 0.502 } }, "cores": 2, "softirq": { "pct": 0.001, "norm": { "pct": 0.0005 } }, "steal": { "pct": 0, "norm": { "pct": 0 } }, "user": { "pct": 0.996, "norm": { "pct": 0.498 } } } }, "beat": { "name": "apache", "hostname": "apache", "version": "6.2.4" } } * * * My config is like this: * * * - module: system period: 10s metricsets: - module: system period: 1m metricsets: - module: system period: 15m metricsets: - module: system metricsets: cpu - module: system metricsets: [cpu] cpu.metrics: ["percentages", "normalized\_percentages"] * * * ---
**Author:** ![lserranov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3bc359/32.png) [@lserranov](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/lserranov)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 8:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/metricbeat-cpu-information-is-wrong/131390/4 "2018-05-17T20:24:13Z")
Any further feedback? Is it a version issue, a config issue? Thanks Luis ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2018, 10:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/metricbeat-cpu-information-is-wrong/131390/5 "2018-06-14T22:24:17Z")
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