
How to Set Up Metric Collection Using Graphite and Statsd on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - kinvey
http://www.kinvey.com/blog/item/158-how-to-set-up-metric-collection-using-graphite-and-statsd-on-ubuntu-1204-lts
======
peterwwillis
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.

~~~
bobf
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
Possible to share your puppet scripts ?

------
wickedchicken
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>

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
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.

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

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
The point is: what constitutes a "measurement"? A data point for each metric I
submit? Or can I send data points for multiple metrics in a batch, is this
considered a single "measurement"? I have no idea, and the support page
doesn't cover that. That means, if I can't word it clearly to my financial
department, they won't subscribe.

~~~
josephruscio
Appreciate the feedback (librato co-founder here), we should definitely make
that clearer on the pricing page and elsewhere. We're in the process of adding
some content around that now.

In short a measurement is a single datapoint i.e. <key, value, timestamp>. So
if you have a sense of how many metrics you want to track and at what
frequency, it's relatively straight-forward to calculate the list price.
There's an estimator on the pricing page to help you do that once you
understand what constitutes a "measurement".

~~~
stock_toaster
Is that price competitive? I only looked at stat-hat recently, and for
whatever reason their pricing seemed more reasonable. Perhaps it was just how
they pitch it, as units by the million.

That said, librato seems like it would be nice if your stat volume was low.

~~~
josephruscio
I think it's definitely competitive if you look across all the entrants in
this space (or similar/adjacent) ones. That doesn't necessarily make us the
lowest priced however ;-). Roughly speaking a million measurements costs $2.00
with our current list pricing. We do have progressive volume discounts
(described in the FAQ) that kick in at higher measurement counts.

------
hcarvalhoalves
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_toaster
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.

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

I sticked to Munin for the time being.

~~~
taligent
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.

