Setting up flume to use ganglia results in a lot of error messages in /var/log/messages

[Juhani Connolly]

We just noticed that ganglia's gmetad is spamming messages like the 
following

Dec  9 03:13:20 om-pat-obs01 /usr/sbin/gmetad[17407]: RRD_update 
(/var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume KDDI/blog-wap02/flume.SINK.avro2.Type.rrd): 
/var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume KDDI/blog-wap02/flume.SINK.avro2.Type.rrd: 
conversion of 'SINK' to float not complete: tail 'SINK'
Dec  9 03:13:20 om-pat-obs01 /usr/sbin/gmetad[17407]: RRD_update 
(/var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume 
KDDI/blog-wap02/flume.CHANNEL.ch1.Type.rrd): /var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume 
KDDI/blog-wap02/flume.CHANNEL.ch1.Type.rrd: conversion of 'CHANNEL' to 
float not complete: tail 'CHANNEL'
Dec  9 03:13:20 om-pat-obs01 /usr/sbin/gmetad[17407]: RRD_update 
(/var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume KDDI/blog-wap11/flume.SINK.avro1.Type.rrd): 
/var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume KDDI/blog-wap11/flume.SINK.avro1.Type.rrd: 
conversion of 'SINK' to float not complete: tail 'SINK'
Dec  9 03:13:20 om-pat-obs01 /usr/sbin/gmetad[17407]: RRD_update 
(/var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume 
KDDI/blog-wap11/flume.SOURCE.scribe.Type.rrd): 
/var/lib/ganglia/rrds/Flume 
KDDI/blog-wap11/flume.SOURCE.scribe.Type.rrd: conversion of 'SOURCE' to 
float not complete: tail 'SOURCE'

The counters are tracked fine on the web interface, but we've had 
issues(gmetad crashing or not starting up, I'm still trying to get 
specifics from the responsible people). I can't say for sure if this is 
a ganglia problem or a problem with flumes ganglia support. Anyone else 
feeding their counters to ganglia getting similar? Perhaps the ganglia 
ml may be more appropriate, not sure on this one.