I am exploring sources of system utilization signals that can be used in a feedback control system for some of our autonomous background processing. One possible source for such signals is Wavefront, via its API.
The “autonomous” processing in question is low-priority work that must defer to interactive, on-line customer traffic and processing so as not to interfere with or impede that activity. On the other hand, we would like to maximize utilization of our existing hardware capacity (e.g., database or networking).
One obvious concern is the delay between when a metric point is emitted by one of our systems and when it becomes available for a query. However, I believe this application could tolerate delays of a minute or so and would probably sample at about that rate or slower.
I would like to solicit thoughts from the Wavefront community on whether Wavefront might be a suitable source of signals for use in a feedback control system.