{"id":2256,"date":"2011-10-08T16:16:15","date_gmt":"2011-10-08T15:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.devco.net\/?p=2256"},"modified":"2011-10-08T17:28:20","modified_gmt":"2011-10-08T16:28:20","slug":"gdash-graphite-dashboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/archives\/2011\/10\/08\/gdash-graphite-dashboard.php","title":{"rendered":"GDash &#8211; Graphite Dashboard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I love graphite, I think it&#8217;s amazing, I specifically love that it&#8217;s essentially Stats as a Service for your network since you can get hold of the raw data to integrate into other tools.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve started pushing more and more things to it on my network like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.devco.net\/archives\/2011\/10\/02\/interact-with-munin-node-from-ruby.php\">all my Munin data as per my previous blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s missing though is a very simple to manage dashboard.  Work is ongoing by the Graphite team on this and there&#8217;s been a new release this week that refines their own dashboard even more.  <\/p>\n<p>I wanted a specific kind of dashboard though:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The graph descriptions should be files that you can version control<\/li>\n<li>Graphs should have meta data that&#8217;s visible to people looking at the graphs for context.  The image below show a popup that is activated by hovering over a graph.<\/li>\n<li>Easy bookmarkable URLs<\/li>\n<li>Works in common browsers and resolutions<\/li>\n<li>Allow graphs to be added\/removed\/edited on the fly without any heavy restarts required using something like Puppet\/Chef &#8211; graphs are just text files in a directory<\/li>\n<li>Dashboards and graphs should be separate files that can be shared and reused<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I wrote such a dashboard with the very boring name &#8211; <em>GDash<\/em> &#8211; that you can find <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/ripienaar\/gdash\">in my GitHub<\/a>.  It only needs <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sinatrarb.com\/\">Sinatra<\/a> and uses the excellent <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.github.com\/bootstrap\/\">Twitter bootstrap framework<\/a> for the visual side of things.<\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"http:\/\/www.devco.net\/images\/gdash-large.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.devco.net\/images\/gdash-small.png\"><\/a><br \/>\n<small>click for full size<\/small><\/center><\/p>\n<p>The project is setup to be hosted in any Rack server like Passenger but it will also just work in <a href=\"http:\/\/heroku.com\/\">Heroku<\/a>, if you hosted it on Heroku it would create URLs to your private graphite install.  To get it going on Heroku just follow their <a href=\"http:\/\/devcenter.heroku.com\/articles\/quickstart\">QuickStart Guide<\/a>.  Their free tier should be enough for a decent sized dashboard.  Deploying the app into Heroku once you are signed up and setup locally is just 2 commands.<\/p>\n<p>You should only need to edit the <em>config.ru<\/em> file to optionally enable authentication and to point it at your Graphite and give it a name.  After that you can add graphs, the example one that creates the above image is in the <em>sample<\/em> directory.  <\/p>\n<p>More detail about the graph DSL used to describe graphs can be <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/ripienaar\/gdash#readme\">found at GitHub<\/a>, I know the docs for the DSL needs to be improved and will do so soon.<\/p>\n<p>I have a few plans for the future:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>As I am looking to replace Munin I will add a host view that will show common data per host.  It will show all the data there and you can give it display hints using the same DSL<\/li>\n<li>Add a display mode suitable for big monitors &#8211; wider layout, no menu bar<\/li>\n<li>Some more configuration options for example to set defaults that apply to all graphs<\/li>\n<li>Add a way to use <a href=\"http:\/\/dygraphs.com\/\">dygraphs<\/a> to display Graphite data<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ideas, feedback and contributions welcome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love graphite, I think it&#8217;s amazing, I specifically love that it&#8217;s essentially Stats as a Service for your network since you can get hold of the raw data to integrate into other tools. I&#8217;ve started pushing more and more things to it on my network like all my Munin data as per my previous [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[121,85,100,64,13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2256"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2278,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256\/revisions\/2278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}