Monitoring with Graphite

Preface

Twenty years ago, it was considered bleeding edge to monitor your internet router with SNMP and a Perl script. These tools gave network administrators a new level of insight into their operations and user activity. As the popularity of the internet soared, so too did the number of successful online businesses and services. This, predictably, led to better monitoring and trending software. On the one hand, businesses had to defend their investment against service and network outages; on the other, they needed improved methods for capacity planning as their systems scaled to meet user demand.

Graphite is one of the most powerful monitoring tools available today. Its popularity is driven not only by open source availability, but also by its ease of use, rapid graph prototyping abilities, and friendly rendering API that allows anyone to embed Graphite charts in their applications and websites. The Graphite user community is huge and routinely feeding enhancements back into the core project, such as new statistical and transformative functions, output formats like JSON for client-side chart rendering, and even pluggable storage backends to leverage the growing ecosystem of distributed database systems.

Who Should Read This Book

Monitoring with Graphite is for anyone who wants to learn more about monitoring systems, services, or applications. The book makes few assumptions about your background or experiences other than that you have access to a computer for setting up and ...