Topic Statistics

Previous Tutorial: Development

Overview

Topic statistics provides a mechanism to quantify transport performance between a publisher and subscriber. When enabled, a subscriber on a topic can measure:

1. Number of dropped messages,
2. Publication statistics,
3. Reception statistics, and
4. Message age statistics.

Dropped messages are detected by the subscriber when an incoming message has an ID that is larger than 1 plus the previous message ID. A message can be dropped for a number of reasons. For example, a message can be dropped when the publication and/or subscription buffers overflow.

Publication statistics capture information about when messages are sent by a publisher. The average Hz rate, minimum and maximum times between publications, and standard deviation of publication times are available.

Similarly, reception statistics capture information about when messages are received by a subscriber. The average Hz rate, minimum and maximum times between receptions, and standard deviation of reception times are available.

Finally, message age statistics capture information between publication and reception. The age of a message is the time between publication and reception. We are ignoring clock discrepancies. The average, minimum, maximum, and standard deviation values of message age are available.

Usage

The GZ_TRANSPORT_TOPIC_STATISTICS environment variable must be set to 1 for both publishers and subscribers. Setting GZ_TRANSPORT_TOPIC_STATISTICS to 1 will change the wire protocol, which will prevent communication with nodes that have not set GZ_TRANSPORT_TOPIC_STATISTICS to 1.

Additionally, a node on the subscriber side of a pub/sub relationship must call EnableStats. For example:

if (!node.EnableStats(topic, true))
{
  std::cout << "Unable to enable stats\n";
}

A complete example can be found in the subscriber_stats example program.

With both GZ_TRANSPORT_TOPIC_STATISTICS set to 1 and a node enabling topic statistics, then you will be able to echo statistic information from the command line using gz topic -et /statistics.

It is possible to change the statistics output topic from /statistics to one of your choosing by specifying a topic name when enabling topic statistics. For example:

if (!node.EnableStats(topic, true, "/my_stats"))
{
  std::cout << "Unable to enable stats\n";
}

You can also change the statistics publication rate from 1Hz by specifying the new Hz rate after the statistic's topic name:

if (!node.EnableStats(topic, true, "/my_stats", 100))
{
  std::cout << "Unable to enable stats\n";
}

Example

‍NOTE It is essential to have a valid value of GZ_PARTITION environment variable and to have it set to the same value in all open terminals. As GZ_PARTITION is based on hostname and username, especially Windows and Mac users might have problems due to spaces in their username, which are not a valid character in GZ_PARTITION. gz-transport prints error Invalid partition name in such case. To resolve that, set GZ_PARTITION explicitly to a valid value:

# Linux and Mac
export GZ_PARTITION=test
# Windows
set GZ_PARTITION=test

If you have the Gazebo Transport sources with the example programs built, then you can test topic statistics by following these steps.

1. Terminal 1: GZ_TRANSPORT_TOPIC_STATISTICS=1 ./example/build/publisher

1. Terminal 2: GZ_TRANSPORT_TOPIC_STATISTICS=1 ./example/build/subscriber_stats

1. Terminal 3: GZ_TRANSPORT_TOPIC_STATISTICS=1 gz topic -et /statistics