Template:FAQ:Agent 34

No. Unfortunately, the original definition of the various CPU statistics was a little vague. It referred to a "percentage", without specifying what period this should be calculated over. It was therefore implemented slightly differently on different architectures.

The 5.4 release has clarified the situation, and standardised on calculating these percentages over a minute. The relevant MIB descriptions have been updated to make the desired behaviour more explicit.

The Net-SNMP agent also includes "raw counters", which can be used to calculate the percentage usage over any desired period. This is the "right" way to handle things in the SNMP model. The original percentage objects have been deprecated, and may possibly be removed in a future release of the agent.

Note that this is different from the Unix load average, which is available via the loadTable, and is supported on all architectures.