The Value Hosted Graphite brings to the Heroku Marketplace

What is HostedGraphite?

Hosted Graphite is a time-series metrics monitoring tool used for application, systems, infrastructure and network monitoring. HostedGraphite is a Hosted Graphite service that offers the full capabilities and benefits of Graphite, without any of the hassle of trying to set up your own open-source Graphite installation. 

Monitoring your Heroku stack is crucial for gaining insights into your application's performance and infrastructure. By identifying bottlenecks, slow queries, or resource-intensive processes, you can optimize your system for better efficiency. Real-time monitoring enables you to promptly detect issues or anomalies while setting up alerts based on predefined thresholds ensures timely notification of any problems. While Heroku offers a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, monitoring resource usage, such as CPU, memory, Heroku dyno metrics, consumption, Postgres metrics, Redis metrics and Kafka metrics are all essential to ensure your application can handle user traffic effectively.

What are the benefits of using Hosted Graphite?

Hosted Graphite allows you to:

• Achieve your SLAs by enabling your team to identify performance issues, and fix them on the spot. 

• Identify the system performance metrics for specific services, enable action on a per-service basis, and identify an ROI on a per-service basis.

• Maintain excellent long-term records of system performance metrics, allowing you to plan, maintain and identify areas that need improvement. 

• Communicate clearly with customers, managers, and non-technical members of your team with great dashboards and clear data.  

• Scale your monitoring with our low-cost tool that was built specifically for scaling. Hundreds of thousands of custom metrics are no problem for Hosted Graphite - we are designed to scale.

Hosted Graphite on Heroku

The HostedGraphite application on Heroku amplifies the original HostedGraphite platform by offering dashboards that automatically pull your Heroku metrics. This makes it easy and fast to set up your Heroku monitoring so you can get back to what you do best: building your business. 

The automatic dashboards have metrics for load, memory, and HTTP metrics such as HTTP success counts, HTTP error client counts, HTTP server error counts, HTTP request counts by method, and many more. You can also easily build your own dashboards and integrate your other data sources, such as AWS.

Use Cases for Hosted Graphite

HostedGraphite is best applied as a systems, infrastructure and application monitoring tool. HostedGraphite is also commonly used for business intelligence. The real strength of Hosted Graphite comes from the ability to pipe in any time-series metrics from throughout your application. You can see your infrastructure, application and business metrics all on one single dashboard. 

This enables teams to identify what the problems are and exactly which customers are affected.

Check out the HostedGraphite customer profiles here, and see how our customers are using the product. 

Key Features of Hosted Graphite

Hosted Graphite offers its users a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure, systems, and application monitoring. The platform is made up of three of the most popular open-source monitoring software services: Graphite, Prometheus, and Grafana. 

Plugins for a number of other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and Kubernetes. All of these specialized tools are available within the HostedGraphite environment as a single product. 

Through this hosted environment, HostedGraphite works to boost the unique features of the open-source projects to give you more functionality than the original products. Below are some of the HostedGraphite features at a glance: 

Hosted Graphite

Graphite as a monitoring tool specializes in two things: 

1. storing numeric time series data

2. rendering graphs for said data. 

Graphite itself was not designed to collect data, but it includes a component called Carbon which passively listens for time series data and is usually deployed with a collector agent such as StatsD or collectd. HostedGraphite’s Heroku add-on takes care of all metric processing for you, without you having to worry about anything.

The data is then stored within a library called Whisper. Using the stored data, you can render on-demand graphs. To use Graphite, external applications should be configured to send data to the Carbon component, since Graphite doesn’t actively pull data like Prometheus. HostedGraphite also improves upon Whisper with a cluster-native storage system.

HostedGraphite takes all the good aspects of open-source Graphite and then adds all the features that were missing to make it much more useful. Some add-ons include team accounts, an inbuilt collector agent, integrations to services and other technologies like AWS and Heroku, logging tools, granular dashboard permissions, and many more.

With HostedGraphite, you can get alerts for any actionable events through multiple online channels, control access to your dashboards, collaborate and share with your team, and modify or automate what you need to do through the HostedGraphite APIs.

Grafana Dashboards

Through HostedGraphite's hosted Grafana dashboards, you can gain a deeper understanding of your data on a slick, feature-rich graph and dashboard editor. The intuitive user interface makes it easy to create and edit dashboards. You can add panels and rows, apply zoom, and use many other features to customize your graphs as needed. HostedGraphite’s Grafana gives you access to:

• Pre-built dashboards customized for different Heroku add-ons

• Easy alerting according to your preferred notification channel

• Managed servers and data storage centers

All of the HostedGraphite plans include Grafana dashboards for data visualization, regardless of the size of plan. 

Conclusion

Monitoring your Heroku infrastructure and add-ons is crucial for optimizing performance, ensuring resource efficiency, and proactively addressing issues. It allows you to detect and resolve bottlenecks, anomalies, and security incidents in real-time, contributing to a better user experience. Additionally, effective monitoring aids in cost optimization by identifying unused resources and ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations. Hosted Graphite integrates seamlessly with Heroku, and offers a monitoring environment for much less than other platforms, like Data Dog.

Tools like dashboards and alerts will complement your data by providing real-time visualization, proactive identification of issues, historical trend analysis, and facilitating informed decision-making, all of which are essential for maintaining a robust and efficient infrastructure. 

Sign up for the free trial, and experiment with monitoring your Heroku stack today. You can also book a demo and talk to the MetricFire team directly about your monitoring needs.