Monitoring Graphite APIs with collectd

To integrate Graphite APIs and collectd with your monitoring system, please reach out to MetricFire. Book a demo with the MetricFire team to discuss integrating Graphite APIs and collectd and how that can support your monitoring system.

Graphite-API is a tool designed to fetch metrics from time series databases such as Whisper or Cyanite. Once it has gathered the metrics, it then renders graphs or JSON data out of each of these time series. Graphite-API is an API-based alternative to Graphite-web, so it does not have any built-in dashboard. Instead, this AP server tool replicates Graphite-web behavior, and works with the abundant Graphite dashboard applications available on the market such as Grafana.

The Graphite-API application comes with several improvements over Graphite-web:

• The Graphite-API application is entirely stateless and doesn't require a SQL database to function.
• It supports both Python 2 and 3.
• The HTTP API accepts JSON data and allows the formation of data and query string parameters.
• The application is straightforward for the user to install and configure.
• Graphite-API architecture is simpler, almost minimalistic, and it has fewer moving parts than Graphite-web.
• It comes with a plugin architecture for integrating with time series databases or for adding more analysis functions.
• The API codebase has a stronger focus on test coverage and code quality.

Graphite API does not come with any web or graphical interfaces. This feature gap is where MetricFire comes into its own.

With our Hosted Graphite solution, we've taken the best parts of open-source Graphite and supercharged them. We also added everything missing in Graphite: a built-in agent, team accounts, granular dashboard permissions, and integrations with other technologies and services like AWS, Heroku, logging tools, and more. Hosted Graphite's advanced filtering lets you choose only the data views you want to see, so you can discard the rest. You can also set up simple rules to discard data you no longer keep, plus receive alerts via email or the Slack messaging platform.

Collectd is system statistics collection daemon that periodically retrieves system and application performance metrics and then stores them using various storage solutions such as RRD files. Collectd is a free open-source project. It can gather metrics from multiple sources, including operating systems, applications, log files, and external devices. You can use the statistics compiled by collectd to monitor systems, detect performance bottlenecks, and predict future system loads.

Because it's written in C, collectd is built for performance and portability, allowing you to run it on systems with no scripting language or an embedded system. It comes with optimizations and features to handle hundreds of thousands of metrics. Collectd also lets you configure what metrics you want to capture and what frequency you want to capture them, allowing you to scale back your metrics collection collect only the metrics that make sense for your business needs. Its modular architecture allows the daemon to use only the resources required to do the job.

Collectd only performs the collection and transmission of the metrics. It does not analyze or present the metrics on its own. But by integrating collectd with the Metricfire platform, you can enjoy metrics displayed on aesthetically pleasing dashboards. Our integration lets you view metrics on essential systems and application log messages on your Hosted Graphite graphs and dashboards. 

You can download a collectd configuration file pre-filled with your Hosted Graphite account details on our add-ons page. This configuration comes with several collectd plugins enabled, including CPU, DF (file system usage), disk, entropy, interface, load, memory, processes, rrdtool, swap, users and write_graphite.

To integrate Graphite APIs and collectd with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate Graphite APIs and collectd and get Graphite APIs and collectd interacting with your MetricFire dashboards directly.

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. We enable you to use Hosted Graphite and aesthetic custom dashboards to visualize your metrics so you can understand what is happening.

MetricFire offers users a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of popular open-source monitoring software services: Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and Kubernetes. You get all these within a hosted environment as a single product. Not only does MetricFire fit well into the infrastructure monitoring use-case, such as network monitoring and server monitoring, but we also do application monitoring and business intelligence.

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

Cloud Monitoring

Hosted Graphite

Dashboards

The key thing to remember is that Hosted Graphite by MetricFire is more than just Graphite. Our Hosted Graphite product actually adds data dimensionality and better data storage.

The benefits of MetricFire are:

Simple, low-cost pricing
A structured pricing model based on unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allow you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric.

Easy-to-use dashboards
Easily share your dashboards with clients for free.

Responsive alerting
Alert notification integrations PagerDuty, Slack, email, and webhooks.

Freedom of customization
Custom metrics through your code.

Fantastic customer support
Highly available support is provided by engineers for engineers to get you set up quickly.

Enterprise-ready
Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment.