In a more complex environment, we’ll be provisioning new instances of our services pretty frequently, so we want the system we pick to make it very easy to collect metrics from new hosts. We’ll want to be able to look at a metric aggregated for the whole system — for example, the average CPU load — but we’ll also want to aggregate that metric for all the instances of a given service, or even for a single instance of that service. That means we’ll need to be able to associate metadata with the metric to allow us to infer this structure. Graphite is one such system that makes this very easy. It
In a more complex environment, we’ll be provisioning new instances of our services pretty frequently, so we want the system we pick to make it very easy to collect metrics from new hosts. We’ll want to be able to look at a metric aggregated for the whole system — for example, the average CPU load — but we’ll also want to aggregate that metric for all the instances of a given service, or even for a single instance of that service. That means we’ll need to be able to associate metadata with the metric to allow us to infer this structure. Graphite is one such system that makes this very easy. It exposes a very simple API and allows you to send metrics in real time. It then allows you to query those metrics to produce charts and other displays to see what is happening. The way it handles volume is also interesting. Effectively, you configure it so that you reduce the resolution of older metrics to ensure the volumes don’t get too large. So, for example, I might record the CPU for my hosts once every 10 seconds for the last 10 minutes, then an aggregated sample every minute for the last day, down to perhaps one sample every 30 minutes for the last several years. In this way, you can store information about how your system has behaved over a long period of time without needing huge amounts of storage. Graphite also enables you to aggregate across samples, or drill down to a single series, so you can see the response time for your whole system, a group of services, or a single in...
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Metrics trqcking using Graphite
