Technical

• Does Hosted Graphite use Whisper files as its back-end?

  No. Hosted Graphite has replaced Graphite’s traditional file-based whisper format with a compatible datastore running on Riak. This allows us to easily scale up to very large amounts of metrics, while also ensuring that there are multiple redundant copies of the data.

• Does sending metrics affect the speed of my application?

  Sending metrics to Hosted Graphite will have a negligible impact on performance if implemented correctly. If you need to perform metric processing or aggregation before sending, consider doing this asynchronously to minimise performance impact e.g. in another thread.

• When should I consider using TCP vs UDP?

  UDP is a simple way to get started as you can ‘fire and forget’. However, UDP is an unreliable protocol, if you want to be sure that the message was received a TCP Connection is preferred. If you choose TCP, we recommend that you make the connection asychronously (e.g. in another thread) to prevent network conditions from affecting performance of your system. The majority of our incoming traffic is TCP.

• What IP addresses should I whitelist on my firewall to reach the Hosted Graphite carbon endpoint?

  The carbon endpoint currently resolves to the following IP addresses:

  136.243.95.144

  136.243.95.158

  136.243.95.165

  136.243.95.166

  138.201.149.0

  144.76.143.215

  195.201.153.19

  195.201.153.20

  94.130.127.162

  This list is correct as of February 15, 2019 but may change. To retrieve an up-to-date list of IP addresses, run nslookup carbon.hostedgraphite.com in a command prompt or terminal session of your choice.

• How long do you keep data for?

  Keywords: retention, resolution, rollup

  We store data at different resolutions:
  • 5 second data is stored for 1 day (please contact sales to request this resolution)
  • 30 second data is stored for 3 days
  • 5 minute data is stored for 6 months
  • 1 hour data is stored for 2 years. Contact us for longer periods.

  Depending on your query, Graphite will serve data from the most appropriate resolution.

  For example, if you ask for the most recent 30 minutes, that data will come from the 5 second resolution. If you ask for 60 minutes, it’ll come from the 30 second resolution, because serving 5 second data for that query would produce too much data to meaningfully display. However, if you ask for 30 minutes of data from six hours ago, that’ll go back to the 5 second resolution because of how ‘zoomed in’ you are. In this way we allow for a fast, meaningful overview of your data as well as detailed investigation when it becomes necessary.

  In contrast to vanilla Graphite, our backend doesn’t just keep averages - we keep the min, max, avg, sum, and observations of the data sent allowing much more detailed insight into your metrics. We also provide arbitrary percentile data for even more interesting views of your metrics.

• What version of Graphite do you offer?

  We offer Graphite version 1.2.0.

• Do you support Graphite Tags?

  Yes we support graphite tagging but this is currently in beta and we’d love to hear your feedback, please email us.