System.load.norm.1 field exceeds 100%

[TimoW]

Hey Everybody!

This is my first time posting to the forum, because I could not find any related threads.

I am using the Metricbeat to monitor different metrics concerning cluster health. One of which is the CPU usage for which I'm using the system.load.norm.1 field.

Now I am wondering why values associated with this field still exceed 100% from time to time, if it clearly should not be the case for a normalized value.

Google searches as well as the Kibana docs did not present an answer to my question (at least I could not find any) so maybe there are some people around here who could clarify this behavior.

kind regards,
Timo

[Joe_Fleming]

Those metric values are basically just the values from running top. The metricbeat docs explain that field as such:

system.load.norm.1
type: scaled_float

Load for the last minute divided by the number of cores.

One interesting thing about top values is that they can, and regularly do, exceed 100%. This is explained on this stackexchange post, which also mentions "Solaris mode", which sounds like what that field from metricbeat is showing.

So if you're seeing a value of 100%, and you have 4 cores, it means you have a load over 4.0 ((load * 100) / # of cores). You should be able to confirm that by looking at the value for system.load.1, the non-normalized "load average for the last minute" value.

[TimoW]

I think I got the concept now after further reading, I did not know about that. So thanks for pointing me in the right direction Joe!