Overview

Graphite-dashgen automates the creation of Graphite dashboards. It creates per-host or per-group dashboards based on YAML configuration files. The per-host host dashboards are designed to create dashboards on existing collectd metrics. Unlike most of the alternatives below, this project seeks to use existing Graphite 0.9.9+ code.

Example

# Graphite Maintenance
# Delete stale Graphite data
0   22  *   *   *   find /opt/graphite/storage/log/ -type f -mtime +180 -delete
0   22  *   *   *   find /opt/graphite/storage/whisper/collectd/ -type f -mtime +90 -delete
0   22  *   *   *   find /opt/graphite/storage/whisper/statsd/ -type f -mtime +90 -delete
# Delete empty directories
0   23  *   *   *   find /opt/graphite/storage/log/ -type d -empty -delete
0   23  *   *   *   find /opt/graphite/storage/whisper/collectd/ -type d -empty -delete
0   23  *   *   *   find /opt/graphite/storage/whisper/statsd/ -type d -empty -delete
# Regenerate all dashboards
@daily /usr/bin/python -m dashgen -q -f /usr/local/etc/dashgen/dashconf.yml -f /usr/local/etc/dashgen/all_*.yml -H '*'

The crontab example above:

1. Cleans-up old graphite logs
2. Cleans-up old whisper databases
3. Regenerates per-host dashboards using the following configuration files
   1. dashconf.yml: base configuration values
   2. all_dash.yml: per-host dashboard configuration (HOST_all dashboards)
   3. all_graphs.yml: per-host graph defintions for collectd metrics

See additional example configures in examples/.

Notes

• YAML Configuration Files
  • Target entries are as close to web GUI as possible to make it easier to go back and forth
• Dashboard Types
  1. Per-Host
  2. Per-Group
• Per-Host Graphs
  • Types
    1. Host Metrics: identified by glob_verify and may contain glob_metrics
    2. Carbon Metrics: identified by carbon_match and host
  • The combination of glob_metrics and glob_verify should result in a single filesystem glob match
• String Templates
  • Named substitutions draw from target_vars. Graph definitions that contain named substitutions not in target_vars are skipped.
  • Common target_vars include:
    • ${color_combined}
    • ${color_free}
    • ${host}
    • ${metric}
    • ${metric_resolved}
• Graphite Graph Tips and Tricks
  • Lines drawn by graphite obscure the lines drawn before them. Z order is important. Consequently, many of the graphs' metrics change color depending on their values.
  • For graphs that feature a free metric (ex. memory), that free metric is always green (green should not be included in the template's lineColor)
  • If you get your metrics from collectd, they are overly verbose and poorly organized for Graphite globbing. For an example rewrite-rules.conf see:
    • TimZehta / rewrite-rules.conf

Requirements

• Graphite 0.9.9+
• PyYAML (Ubuntu package: python-yaml)

To Do

• More documentation!
• Use templates with different colorList to easily differentiate graphs
• (?) should graphs be sorted by parent instead of children (ex. all disk vda graphs before any vdb graphs)

Alternatives

There are many alternatives and many of them were created before Graphite included a dashboard view. One of the most exciting projects is:

• Grafana

For additional alternatives see the lastest Graphite Tools documentation:

• Tools That Work With Graphite

Contributors

• https://github.com/TimZehta
• https://github.com/insyte

License

• LICENSE.txt (MIT License)