How to Set Up Metric Collection Using Graphite and Statsd on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

http://www.kinvey.com/blog/item/158-how-to-set-up-metric-collection-using-graphite-and-statsd-on-ubuntu-1204-lts

by kinvey • 14 years ago

30 22 14 years ago

I know developers are used to setting stuff up in local environments, but that guide's about 20 steps too many. It would be nice to have an apt package built that encapsulates the operations in that script.

And is it really necessary to install Git just to download some software? The devs should make a tarball out of the 0.3.0 tag and follow standard packaging conventions. /opt/ is for 3rd-party/proprietary stuff or "really big crap" like KDE/Gnome (if you're on certain distros).

If the generation gap between modern developers and Linux package-managing folk is too big, i'll gladly write up some guides that explain how (and why) to package software instead of slapdash local installs.

ljlolel• 14 years ago

Yes that would be great. I've used debian for over a decade but I still don't know how I would turn my python packages or other programs into debs.

bobf3• 14 years ago

Use fpm! https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

bobf3• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more. Graphite is awesome, but the state of its packaging is atrocious. That's probably the biggest barrier to its' widespread adoption, actually. I spent 2 days making my own Graphite packages and automating the install via puppet, which was worthwhile, but shouldn't be necessary.

boundlessdreamz• 14 years ago

Possible to share your puppet scripts ?

bhangm• 14 years ago

I'm the author, and thanks for the feedback.

You're right about the guide being a little too long. I was trying to establish a starting point for people looking to install and set up these tools but it would be better if there was a way to just "apt-get install" this stuff.

I'll see if I can put this together in a deb and release it somehow.

eolamey• 14 years ago

As a packager, I often wonders if developers should package their software themselves. I'm not sure they should produce more than a decent tarball, with clear INSTALL instructions and licensing information. Setting up a clean package building environment (mock for RPM or pbuilder for DEB) is still a hassle.

For what it's worth, I try to maintain RPM packages for graphite for RHEL (and derivatives) over at http://pakk.96b.it/

wickedchicken2• 14 years ago

Excuse the blatant advertising (I contracted with these guys), but Librato Metrics is intended to work like 'Graphite as SaaS' so you don't have to go through this crazy process. They also subscribe to the thought that your metrics should be separate from your production infrastructure -- otherwise when your servers melt your graphing server melts too :). Obviously if you want to stay pure open source then this won't apply, but otherwise it's a pretty neat service. https://metrics.librato.com/ and https://github.com/librato

hcarvalhoalves3• 14 years ago

This service looks great, seems to be just like Graphite feature-wise, but without the clunkyness. The problem is that the pricing makes absolutely no sense and is hard to estimate.

wickedchicken2• 14 years ago

They "charge $0.000002 per measurement. As simple as that." -> https://metrics.librato.com/pricing

pestaa• 14 years ago

I wanted to use Graphite+statsd, but the docs were really sparse.

I sticked to Munin for the time being.

taligent• 14 years ago

It is flakey as hell for me. But Munin2Graphite gets you the best of both worlds.

It's very cool that all my metrics are in one place. Shame it is such an ugly, uncomfortable place.

hcarvalhoalves3• 14 years ago

Graphite is a nice piece of software, but with an absurdly confusing architecture and setup. You have to setup 3 different applications (graphite, carbon and whisper) to have a working server, but you're on your on - there's no comprehensive documentation. Also, I have no idea why it ships with 4 different user interfaces, of which 3 are semi-broken, or why it doesn't adopt RRD as it's default storage (since it can read RRD files if you symlink them). It could be refactored to be only a REST interface for graphing and be just as useful.

stock_toaster2• 14 years ago

You also may want to have something like this in storage-aggregation:

  [stats_counts]
  pattern = ^stats_counts\..*
  xFilesFactor = 0.25
  aggregationMethod = sum

Otherwise stats_counts get averaged at compaction/rotation, instead of summed. Summing seemed more reasonable, for our use cases at least.

How to Set Up Metric Collection Using Graphite and Statsd on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

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