translate (Compute)

When To Use

Use translate to map raw values in one column to normalized values through a lookup table. The typical case is converting vendor-specific status codes (SNMP enumerations, WMI integers, CLI keywords) into the state names your monitor's metrics expect, such as ok, degraded, and failed.

Matching is case-insensitive: translation table keys are lower-cased when the connector is loaded, and the cell value is lower-cased before lookup. If a value is not found, the special default entry is used; if there is no default entry either, the cell is left unchanged (with a warning in the logs).

Syntax

sources:
  diskStatus:
    # DeviceID;Model;StatusCode
    type: snmpTable
    oid: 1.3.6.1.4.1.4413.1.5.2.1
    selectColumns: ID,2,5
    computes:
    - type: translate
      column: 3
      translationTable: ${translation::physicalDiskStatuses}

# Translation tables are declared in the top-level `translations:` section
translations:
  physicalDiskStatuses:
    "3": ok
    "4": degraded
    "5": failed
    "6": failed
    "7": ok
    default: UNKNOWN

Properties

Table Transformation Example

With the physicalDiskStatuses table above applied to column 3:

99 is not a key of the table, so it falls back to the default translation (UNKNOWN).

Recommended Pattern

• Translate status codes into exactly the state names declared in your metric's stateSet (e.g. ok, degraded, failed), so the mapping section can use the column directly.
• Always provide a default entry: devices routinely report codes that were not in the vendor documentation.
• Quote numeric keys ("3": ok) so YAML treats them as strings consistently.
• Declare the table once under translations: and reference it from every source that needs it.

Common Mistakes

• Using a column index that no longer matches the table layout after an upstream keepColumns, awk, or extract compute.
• Referencing the table by bare name instead of ${translation::TableName}.
• Omitting default, which lets untranslated raw codes flow into mapping and break stateSet metrics.
• Translating a whole-cell array value: for cells that contain several values (e.g. 2|11), use arrayTranslate^[1] instead.

Community Examples

• LinuxService^[2]
• GenericUPS^[3]
• MariaDB^[4]

From LinuxService, included directly from the connector source:

- type: translate
  column: 2
  translationTable: ${translation::serviceLoadedTranslationTable}