Memory Usage icon

Memory Usage

Memory Usage

Plugin: proc.plugin Module: /proc/meminfo

Overview

/proc/meminfo provides detailed information about the system’s current memory usage. It includes information about different types of memory, RAM, Swap, ZSwap, HugePages, Transparent HugePages (THP), Kernel memory, SLAB memory, memory mappings, and more.

Monitoring /proc/meminfo can be useful for:

  • Performance Tuning: Understanding your system’s memory usage can help you make decisions about system tuning and optimization. For example, if your system is frequently low on free memory, it might benefit from more RAM.

  • Troubleshooting: If your system is experiencing problems, /proc/meminfo can provide clues about whether memory usage is a factor. For example, if your system is slow and cached swap is high, it could mean that your system is swapping out a lot of memory to disk, which can degrade performance.

  • Capacity Planning: By monitoring memory usage over time, you can understand trends and make informed decisions about future capacity needs.

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 Memory Usage instance

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric Dimensions Unit
system.ram free, used, cached, buffers MiB
mem.available avail MiB
mem.swap free, used MiB
mem.swap_cached cached MiB
mem.zswap in-ram, on-disk MiB
mem.hwcorrupt HardwareCorrupted MiB
mem.commited Commited_AS MiB
mem.writeback Dirty, Writeback, FuseWriteback, NfsWriteback, Bounce MiB
mem.kernel Slab, KernelStack, PageTables, VmallocUsed, Percpu MiB
mem.slab reclaimable, unreclaimable MiB
mem.hugepages free, used, surplus, reserved MiB
mem.thp anonymous, shmem MiB
mem.thp_details ShmemPmdMapped, FileHugePages, FilePmdMapped MiB
mem.reclaiming Active, Inactive, Active(anon), Inactive(anon), Active(file), Inactive(file), Unevictable, Mlocked MiB
mem.high_low high_used, low_used, high_free, low_free MiB
mem.cma used, free MiB
mem.directmaps 4k, 2m, 4m, 1g MiB

Alerts

The following alerts are available:

Alert name On metric Description
ram_in_use system.ram system memory utilization
ram_available mem.available percentage of estimated amount of RAM available for userspace processes, without causing swapping
used_swap mem.swap swap memory utilization
1hour_memory_hw_corrupted mem.hwcorrupt amount of memory corrupted due to a hardware failure

Get Netdata

Sign up for free

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

Go to Live Demo