Data source for tracking "all time" total

[Cylindric]

Hello,

I have just started logging against a PowerMTA server, and all the usual counters for messages/sec and queue sizes etc are great.

One thing I have been asked for is if we can track "total messages sent, ever". There is a counter value I can get to (msg_sent) which just returns a "total out" counter, which increases continuously. The problem is that the counter resets on reboot. This means a typical block of records might look like:

Code: Select all

Reported    |   Actual
59,442,028   59,442,028
61,621,631   61,621,631
62,354,211   62,354,211
   234,555   62,588,766
   903,343   63,257,554
  1,001,122  63,355,333

The only way I can think of is to store the counter value myself, and when it 'overflows' note a new baseline and record future values as reported+baseline. The values are retrieved by a PHP script, so it wouldn't be difficult to process them on the way through.