A Practical Guide to Monitoring Heroku Add-ons with Hosted Graphite

Step 1: Add Hosted Graphite as a Heroku Add-on

Hosted Graphite by MetricFire is a robust data storage backend that enables you to create custom dashboards and alerts using your data. Hosted Graphite manages a service that parses through your Heroku log-drain output, converts the data to the Graphite format, and forwards them to your Hosted Graphite account. You can then use these Graphite metrics to build custom dashboards and alerts. Additionally, you can store more than just Heroku metrics, which can give you visibility into multiple layers of your infrastructure under a single pane of glass.

Heroku has an add-on for Hosted Graphite that can easily be enabled through the Heroku UI, or from a similar command from within the Heroku CLI:

In your Heroku project, run:

heroku addons:create hostedgraphite

This provisions a Hosted Graphite account and starts sending built-in Heroku metrics (e.g., dyno memory, response times) to your Hosted Graphite dashboard.

You can access the dashboard with:

heroku addons:open hostedgraphite

Once the Hosted Graphite add-on is provisioned (default plan is Intro), you can navigate to your account from within the Heroku UI:

Once Heroku dyno metrics are flowing into your Hosted Graphite account, a default Heroku dashboard will be automatically installed. This dashboard offers a great starting point for your monitoring and can be customized further:

If you are not receiving web metrics, you probably have to enable Log Runtime Metrics from within your Heroku CLI:

heroku labs:enable log-runtime-metrics -a <app-name>
heroku restart -a <app-name>

Step 2: Monitoring the Heroku Postgres Add-On

If you use Heroku's Postgres Add-On at the standard or premium tier, 30 performance metrics per DB instance will be forwarded to your Hosted Graphite account. They are prefixed with: heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.<type> and these are the metrics as they appear in the Graphite (dot-notation) format:

heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.database.active-connections
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.database.current_transaction
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.database.db_size
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.database.index-cache-hit-rate
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.database.table-cache-hit-rate
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.database.tables
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.database.waiting-connections
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-15m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-1m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-5m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.memory-cached
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.memory-free
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.memory-postgres
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.memory-total
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.read-iops
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.tmp-disk-available
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.tmp-disk-used
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.wal-percentage-used
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-postgres.<instance-name>.server.write-iops

Hosted Graphite also provides a pre-configured dashboard for these metrics that can be installed from their Dashboard Library:

Step 3: Monitoring the Heroku Redis Add-On

If you use the Heroku Redis add-on at any tier, 12 metrics will be automatically forwarded to your Hosted Graphite account. They are prefixed with: heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.<type> and these are the metrics as they appear in the Graphite format:

heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.database.active-connections
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.redis.evicted-keys
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.redis.hit-rate
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.redis.memory-redis
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-15m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-1m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-5m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.memory-cached
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.memory-free
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.memory-total
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.read-iops
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-redis.<instance-name>.server.write-iops

Hosted Graphite also has a pre-configured Heroku Redis dashboard available in their Dashboard Library:

Step 4: Monitoring the Heroku Kafka Add-On

If you use the Heroku Kafka add-on at the Standard tier or above, 10 metrics per cluster node will automatically be forwarded to your Hosted Graphite account. They are prefixed with: heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.<type> and this is what they look like in the Graphite format:

heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.kafka.bytes-in-per-second
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.kafka.bytes-out-per-second
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-15m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-1m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.load-avg-5m
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.memory-cached
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.memory-free
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.memory-total
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.read-iops
heroku.<app-name>.heroku-kafka.<node>.<instance-name>.server.write-iops

Hosted Graphite also has a pre-configured Heroku Kafka dashboard that can be generated from their Dashboard Library:

Step 5: Send Custom Metrics for Add-ons

Heroku doesn't natively send add-on-specific metrics to Graphite. But you can manually send them using API queries or service integrations. Here's how:

Example: Monitor Heroku Postgres Metrics

Heroku provides a CLI plugin for fetching database metrics:

heroku pg:info --app your-app-name

This returns metrics like:

• Connection count
• Database size
• Transaction throughput
• Table cache hit ratio

You can script this using Bash or Python, then send the metrics to Hosted Graphite using StatsD or direct TCP.

Python example:

import statsd
import subprocess

statsd_client = statsd.StatsClient('carbon.hostedgraphite.com', 2003, prefix='YOUR_API_KEY')

# Example: Send connection count
output = subprocess.check_output(['heroku', 'pg:info', '--app', 'your-app-name']).decode()
if "Connections" in output:
    connections = int(output.split("Connections")[1].split()[0])
    statsd_client.gauge("heroku.postgres.connections", connections)

Schedule this with a cron job or a lightweight Heroku worker dyno.

Step 6: Create Custom Alerts using Your Graphite Data

In the Hosted Graphite UI, navigate to Alerts => Graphite Alerts to create a new alert. Name the alert, add a query to the alerting metric field, and add a description of what this alert is (NOTE: you can use wild card (*) searching to grab all metrics from a specified index):

Then select the Alert Criteria tab to set a threshold, and select a notification channel. The default notification channel will be the email you used to sign up for the Hosted Graphite account, but you can easily configure channels for Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, OpsGenie, custom webhooks and more. See the Hosted Graphite docs for more details on notification channels:

MetricFire lets you define alert thresholds for any time series metric.

Examples:

• 🚨 Alert if Redis memory usage > 85%
• 📉 Alert if Postgres cache hit ratio < 90%
• 🛑 Alert if webhook 5xx rate > 1% for 5 minutes

Send alerts to:

• Slack
• Email
• PagerDuty
• Webhooks

This is especially useful when you're depending on third-party services — giving you a heads-up when their performance changes before it breaks yours.