What does docker.cpu.system.pct indicate?

[Jack_Brooks]

I'm looking at my Metricbeat Docker dashboard in Kibana (I believe I'm using v5.4?); the Docker CPU usage graph tells me that the Y axis is displaying "75th percentile of Total CPU time", where the units appear to be steps of .1. It's really unclear to me what this means, since the processes I'm using take more than fractions of a second in the CPU.

I went to the Visualize section for the graph to look at how this graph is put together, and it says that the Y axis is "Percentiles of docker.cpu.total.pct"; so somehow this is looking at the 75th percentile of CPU times taken up by processes at any given time. Now I'm really confused; does this mean that these fractions indicate a percentage? So if something peaks at .5, that means that it's taking 50% of the CPU? If so, how does the percentile come into the picture?

I could use a little guidance for parsing this. Thanks!

[Stacey_Gammon]

Hey @Jack_Brooks,

I agree the name of the y-axis is a bit confusing - the whole dashboard in 6.0 is changing and will hopefully be clearer.

As for your 5.4 dashboard, the y axis is showing the percent of CPU taken up. The graph is showing processes in the 75 - 100th percentile. So it's showing you the CPU percent for your most CPU intensive processes over your time range.

to answer your specific questions:

does this mean that these fractions indicate a percentage?

yes.

So if something peaks at .5, that means that it’s taking 50% of the CPU?

yes.

If so, how does the percentile come into the picture?

Percentiles only comes into play with the processes shown on the graph. It should probably only be in the graph title, not the Y axis, to avoid the confusion.

Hope that helps!

[Jack_Brooks]

That does help! And knowing that the 6.0 dashboard will have some changes is useful. (Is there a demo of the 6.0 dashboard yet?)

Thanks so much!

[Stacey_Gammon]

@Jack_Brooks

Is there a demo of the 6.0 dashboard yet?)

You can download 6.0 beta 2 stack which should have the new dashboard here: Download Elasticsearch | Elastic (well that's the elasticsearch page, but you should be able to find the others)

I don't think we have a public 6.0 dashboard out there. Here is a screenshot anyway given to me by the beats team. Though, it doesn't have any data in it, and there is a bug in the y axis labels during migration.

btw, we are looking for users to try out, find, and report any bugs in the 6.0 stack as part of the pioneer program -
Boldly Go - Elastic Pioneer Program | Elastic Blog