

Graphene: A D3.js, Backbone.js based Graphite Dashboard Toolkit - jondot
https://github.com/jondot/graphene

======
madarco
I'm tracking Graphite evolution since some articles from the Etsy engineers
(Track every Release <http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-
release/> and Measure Everything
[http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-
meas...](http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-
everything/))

However every time I look at the site it seems more and more an abandonware.
Only a quickstart and no proper documentation.

~~~
jondot
The common things you'd want to do in Graphite will be easy, more complex
things requires knowledge which isn't in the docs, but easily found if you're
willing to invest the time in searching and reading code. Of course everyone
would like great documentation; however some open source projects may not have
the time for everything -- and that's ok, because its all free and full of
love. Graphite is a great engineering achievement, and an awesome tool to
have. Give it a try, even though it lacks documentation at this stage.

~~~
madarco
I haven't notice that Graphite is written in python, this is a plus (since we
have several projects in python).

However, why should I prefer Graphite over, for eg, Munin? It's still open
source but also has a proper documentation.

~~~
jondot
I'm not sure they're comparable. I did the same evaluation, one of the many
criteria that I had is a system that can handle many, many data points from
many hosts (at the peak we had 50 production machines) and provide robust
flexible queries over them; with almost 0 maintenance/configuration. Metrics
are created dynamically, the Graphite database is optimized for this problem
(more optimized than RRD - although it seems that recent versions of RRD
closed the gap), and it can take a beating in terms of scale. A single
Graphite instance does this effortlessly.

~~~
madarco
Mmm, not bad, not bad at all.

It doesn't support alarms, right?

~~~
mattyb
Graphite is not a monitoring tool. It stores time series data and graphs it.

You can write a monitoring system that queries Graphite, and send
notifications from there. Graphite can give you the raw data that backs the
graphs:

[http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/url-
api.html#rawda...](http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/url-
api.html#rawdata)

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cicloid
I seen Graphite pop up a lot lately.

Why should I care about Graphite?

~~~
Corrado
Graphite is a very simple time-series graphing solution that does one thing
very well. Setting it up is easy and feeding it data is even easier. It's
basically a little server which builds RRD instances on the fly and allows you
to generate images of graphs using URLs. For example, you can feed it all
kinds of data from your web server, in real time, and have it produce an graph
as a PNG.

I guess for me the best part is the simplicity of the whole thing. Getting
data in is just a simple TCP or UDP socket call (which you can do with almost
anything, from nc to curl). Getting graphs out is a URL (albit a bit complex
to create by hand :). Tying it all together is a simple, but functional, web
interface.

Graphine solves the problem of graph generation and building dashboards in
Graphite. By default Graphite builds PNG graphs which are expensive to build
on the server and aren't dynamic. Graphine coverts these static PNG files to
SVG and lets the browser do all the heavy lifting with regards to rendering.

~~~
Diederich
Graphite is awesome; I've been stuffing more and more of our operational
metrics into it since 2010.

It is, however, not RRD:

[http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/whisper.html#diffe...](http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/whisper.html#differences-
between-whisper-and-rrd)

Having said that, Graphite does not use THE RRD, but it is a kind of round
robin database. :-)

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tmcw
Uhm, awesome. Love it.

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danmaz74
Come on, no online demo? Not even screenshots? How are people supposed to
understand if there is anything good there?

~~~
_pius
<http://jondot.github.com/graphene/>

~~~
danmaz74
Thanks - I hadn't noticed that

