When using JSON output, all "setttings" are strings about pgmetrics HOT 1 OPEN

Thanks for your input!

Right now, the situation is that you need to refer to pg_settings inorder to interpret the "settings" field of the JSON output. Additionally, the pg_settings has to be of the same major version of Postgres as the server you ran pgmetrics on. This is because (1) values have unintuitive units (2) these units differ across versions for the same setting. To illustrate, if the settings says "max_wal_size" is "1", the actual value is either 16777216 bytes (if pg 9.5, 9.6) or 1048576 bytes (if pg 10).

For the settings value to be actually useful -- as in be able to be directly used for processing by a script without needing to consult pg_settings -- would require that the units also be considered while representing the value as a number. Byte-dimension values with non-byte units ("8kB", "MB", "kB" in pg10) should be normalized to bytes and time-dimension values ("min", "ms" in pg10) to seconds.

So, if we have a query or two (and/or Go code) that can do this, then we can add a new field (because we don't want to break the existing JSON schema) of float type (because JSON has only a "number" type, which is 64-bit float) at the same level as "setting", like this:

"settings": {
	//...
	"max_wal_size": {
		"setting": "1",
		"actual": 16777216
	},
	//...
}

from pgmetrics.