

Graphiti: An Alternate Frontend for Graphite - vanessa
http://dev.paperlesspost.com/blog/2011/12/16/introducing-graphiti-an-alternate-frontend-for-graphite/

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nwmcsween
Why would I want to use graphite, a python based graphing solution to say
rrdtool?

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sciurus
Well, you can use graphite as a frontend to your RRD files if you like. I'm
using it to view data gathered by collectd and am planning to throw some RRD
files generated by jmxtrans at it soon.

If you were writing a tool that recorded time-series data, there's some
explanation of why you might choose whisper over rrdtool at
<http://graphite.wikidot.com/whisper>. I don't know of any other projects
thats use whisper directly, though, and the creator of whisper is working on a
replacement for it named ceres (<http://graphite.wikidot.com/roadmap#toc0>).
The primary appeal is of the carbon daemon, which lets you send data to it
over a super-simple protocol and takes care of persisting it for you.

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latchkey
Given that jmxtrans has native support for writing directly to Graphite, why
are you using it to write to rrd files?

If you want those rrd files for other tools, the beauty of jmxtrans is that
you can have multiple outputwriters so you can write to rrd AND graphite at
the same time, with no loss in performance, since it happens in a
multithreaded environment.

Also note, writing to rrd files from jmxtrans is terribly inefficient. It
spawns the rrdtool to do it because (unfortunately) the java implementation of
rrd outputs files which are not compatible with rrdtool.

(I'm the author of jmxtrans. Thanks for using my stuff!)

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latchkey
Graphite is a great tool for quickly seeing what is going on. Generating the
graphs was always a bit of a pain point for it. I must say, this is an amazing
contribution. Thanks so much.

(I'm the author of <http://jmxtrans.googlecode.com> which allows you to very
easily tie together Graphite & Java Management Extensions (JMX) for monitoring
all of your JVM's.)

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josephruscio
Another alternative is to consider a service that handles
storage/visualization/alerting/etc for your time-series data. I work for a
startup that does exactly that and there are other options in this space as
well. Would love any feedback you guys might have:
<https://metrics.librato.com>

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latchkey
I'm so sorry, but I really don't see the value in spending $26.78/month for
only 50 metrics. I could install Graphite on a small instance at AWS and get
nearly unlimited metrics for a fraction of the cost.

Never mind the fact that if I point your tool at a JVM, I can quickly get over
50 metrics (and double my cost to $53.57 since your slider only goes in
increments of 50) just by looking at a single ehcache instance.

Yes, your service is nice, your graphs are pretty, but at the end of the day,
I think I'd have a hard time convincing my boss (me) that this is a valuable
thing to spend a lot of money on.

It seems like a lot of these 'monitoring' companies are springing up these
days. I feel bad for you because I see that industry quickly being
commoditized into who offers the lowest price. It is also not the easiest
problem to solve because of the data storage and availability requirements.

Anyway, I don't mean any ill will. I wish you the best in your business, I
just don't see how it would work for me.

~~~
josephruscio
I appreciate you taking the time to look over our marketing content and giving
your frank opinion :-), no ill will perceived at all. It helps us to know
where we need to improve our communication around the value we are providing.
In that spirit, I'll take a brief stab addressing some of your concerns here:

1) Your time is the most expensive resource. The cost of hosting your own
solutions is almost always dwarfed by the cost of time you spend configuring
it, maintaining it, and recovering it in the face of failures. We provide the
same value here as any SaaS team in any vertical. We care and manage for the
infrastructure and are constantly developing and rolling out new features. Of
course the time needed to invest depends on one's time and experience, but we
intend to save a lot of people a lot of time.

2.) A small EC2 instance costs $61/month and has finite disk bandwidth (and
CPU). You might get more than 50 metrics, but it's going to come up a lot
short of "nearly unlimited". Most people I know running serious Graphite
installations end up needing collocated physical hardware with SSD's. That's
going to cost you more like $1K-$2K/month. You will still have a SPOF unless
you double that cost. We handle all the scaling and reliability for you.

3) Our pricing is completely linear per the number of metrics, the steps in
the slider are just to make it easier to chunk around different numbers. There
are no step-wise increases that double your costs. I appreciate your comment
here as it had not occurred to me that someone might (reasonably) infer a
stepwise increase in pricing.

4) We also include other valuable tools like threshold-based alerting on all
your data streams with GUI integration to 3rd party services like Campfire,
PagerDuty, Email, Custom Webhooks, with more to come.

5) A lot of 'monitoring' companies are springing up these days because the
market is clamoring for it ;-). While some teams would rather handle these
things in-house, a lot of other teams would rather focus on building their
core business value and out-source infrastructure head-aches. It's the same
economics pushing teams to outsource version-control, logging, hosting, etc.

~~~
latchkey
_excellent_ response Joseph. Thanks. If I end up needing these services at
some point, I'll definitely look into your company first.

~~~
josephruscio
Thanks! One more thing, right after hitting reply, I realized the numbers you
saw sounded too high. So I checked out our pricing page and it turns out we
had a regression in the estimator. 50 metrics reported every 60 seconds costs
$4.46, not $26.78. For the $26.78 you can push 300 metrics every 60 seconds.
Just pushed out a fix and it shows the correct values now, so this exchange
was really helpful!

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relix
Hey Joseph,

I myself was skeptical when reading OPs numbers, but if I can get reliable
metrics like that for just $4.46 a month I might even consider using your
service! You should definitely edit your post above to reflect that the price
was too high for the numbers quoted, as maybe not everyone will read this far
in the thread to discover it.

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sciurus
As this post recognizes, there are a lot of components bundled under the name
Graphite:

* There's whisper, the file format carbon uses to store time-series data.

* There's carbon, the daemons that accept data over the network, combines them, and writes them to whisper files.

* There's graphite, a django application that can read data from carbon files or RRD files. Graphite features several user interfaces of its own as well as an API to render the data as graphs or as numerical values.

What I find most interesting is graphite's API's potential as an intermediary
service between your metrics storage (whether its RRD, whisper, or some other
format that you add support for) and your applications that need to consume
those metrics (e.g. your monitoring system, your dashboards).

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potch
I've been working on a less-configurable sort of graphite dashboard for use as
an ambient display- <https://github.com/potch/statsdash>. Looks great on a
tablet.

~~~
sciurus
Another alternate graphite frontend worth following is Gdash. I like that its
dashboard and graph configuration is done through YAML files.

[http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/10/08/gdash-graphite-
dash...](http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/10/08/gdash-graphite-
dashboard.php).

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devinfoley
I'm very excited by this. Graphite is an amazing tool, but the UI feels a bit
outdated.

