Graph-explorer

A graphite dashboard that's different, from Vimeo

Structures your metrics

The Graphite tree model is hard to organize and query, it lacks information and can be inflexible when building graphs. GE uses a multi-dimensional metric database so that your metrics like

servers.dfvimeodfs1.diskspace._srv_node_dfs10.byte_used

become structured, self-describing, tagged metrics:

{
    server=dfvimeodfs1
    plugin=diskspace
    mountpoint=_srv_node_dfs10
    unit=B
    type=used
    target_type=gauge
}

This enables a bunch of features that are otherwise not possible.

Compose graphs on the fly

Using simple GEQL queries you retrieve metrics, process and organize them into graphs. Graphs are never predefined because there's no need to hardcode metric names or graphite function calls.

Screenshot query

Shown above: powerful pattern search with tag filtering, regexes, equality checks, negation, etc.

Units

Every metric gets a standardized unit tag, so:

you always know exactly what you're looking at
Graph-Explorer converts units for you and derives as needed. E.g. it can render a metric in B(ytes) as an amount of TB, bytes per day, Gibibits per hour, ...
Because every metric self-describes its type it knows that for example counters are most useful when derived by default

Screenshot units

Online aggregation

Choose one or more tag keys to combine targets by, and represent them as one metric. For example: show network traffic per interface, averaged across all servers and summed by type (rx and tx).

Also shown here is averaging over any arbitrary timespan.

Group metrics into graphs

Group by arbitrary tag keys. For example: "group by server" show bytes used for all mountpoints on per-server graphs whereas "group by mountpoint" creates graphs per mountpoint, each showing the bytes used on each server by that mountpoint.

Correlate with events

Integrates with anthracite for displaying annotated events. More specifically, you can show events from ElasticSearch, and you can filter them with powerfull Lucene queries, which is great to look for specific deploys/fixes of specific tickets etc. Trivial example below.

Interactive graphs

realtime zooming, inspect datapoints, switch display mode, etc.

Averaging over time & trending: Is the curve too jagged? Average it out over any timeframe

Dashboards, basically working with multiple queries at once

apply preferences by tag matching (for example use binary units for all graphs that show bytes related to memory and hard drives), or show GET and PUT requests always in a fitting color, irrespective of dashboard or plugin

Discover all about graph-explorer

Introduction to metrics 2.0 & Graph-Explorer

view on Vimeo

On the roadmap

Comments on graphs/dashboards. Want to integrate with something like talkatv for that
Better displaying of annotated events. Leverage anthracite event search/filtering
Allow to modify queries of a dashboard directly. In other words: allow to split up the query page into multiple queries with each their result