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Graphite is a free and open-source software. It is used as a time-series database monitoring tool, where you can collect, store and display time-series data in real-time. As you can monitor certain metrics of this data using Graphite, it has a very useful and simple dashboard used to visualize these metrics.
This article will show you how to display a metric on your Graphite dashboard.
Monitoring metrics is highly important to operate distributed systems in production. Alluxio collects metrics using the Codahale Metrics Library on I/O throughput, RPC throughput, and resource usage. Alluxio metrics are shown in its webUI but are also available through a REST endpoint or exportable to several third-party sinks in a time-series manner (see docs).
Grafana, a comprehensive metrics visualization software, ties into this process by pulling the metrics that systems like Alluxio collect through a sink and visualizes them in a more helpful fashion. This guide will cover how to set up Grafana and Graphite, a supported sink for Alluxio, which will put metrics in a time-series database, along with exploring some of the possibilities that the combination offers.
Time series metrics reporting and alerting is an essential tool when it comes to monitoring production services. Graphs help you monitor trends over time, identify spikes in load/latency, identify bottlenecks with constrained resources, etc. Dropwizard Metrics is a great library for collecting metrics and has a lot of features out of the box including various JVM metrics. There are also many third-party library hooks for collections metrics on HikariCP connections pools, Redis client connections, HTTP client connections, and many more.
Once metrics are being collected we need a time series data store as well as a graphing and alerting system to get the most out of our metrics. This example will be utilizing Grafana Cloud which offers cloud-hosted Grafana, a graphing and alerting application that hooks into many data sources, as well as two options for time series data sources Graphite and Prometheus. StubbornJava has public facing Grafana dashboards that will continue to add new metrics as new content is added. Take a look at the StubbornJava Overview dashboard to start with.