Graphite Tip - A Better Way to Store Events
2014-01-05 20:54:03 by jdixon
Graphite is well known for storing simple key/value metrics using the Whisper time-series database on-disk format. What is not well known about Graphite is that it also ships with a feature known as Events that supports a richer form of metrics storage suitable for, well, events. Imagine a place where you could store tagged metrics and additional data relevant to the event (e.g. code snippets, comments, etc). Many folks use NoSQL databases such as HBase for this purpose, and that's a perfectly reasonable approach. However, if you'd like to store these somewhere where they can be correlated with the rest of your Graphite metrics, then Events might be a good fit for you.
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My Impressions of InfluxDB
2013-11-11 12:15:38 by jdixon
I mentioned last week that I was planning to look closer at InfluxDB this past weekend, and some folks asked me to do a writeup on my findings.
InfluxDB is a time-series metrics and events database based on the LevelDB key-value store. LevelDB was written and open sourced by Google, and is an optional backend for Riak. InfluxDB (or "Influx", for short) inherits many of LevelDB's default characteristics, which means it's optimized for writes and uses compression by default, but it can be slow for reads and deletes.
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What's Up with Playfair?
2013-10-19 02:58:37 by jdixon
Within the last hour I stumbled across a tweet from Dan Ryan mentioning a new hosted Graphite + StatsD service called Playfair. As you might expect, this piqued my interest.
Immediately, I thought of Hosted Graphite and wondered how this compares with their offering. Would it have its own dashboard? Was it a DigitalOcean-backed Graphite instance (admittedly, something I've considered trying to package up myself)? I hopped over to their website and looked around.
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Graphite Tip - Mixing Lines and Stacks
2013-08-16 13:43:15 by jdixon
One of Graphite's shortcomings is that it's not easy to construct a composite chart of both lines and area sections. In fact, it's not possible at all unless you're willing to stack your areas. But if you are dealing with data where it makes sense to stack them, and you want to correlate that with something else as a line series, here's an example demonstrating how you can do it.
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Graphite Tip - Counting Number of Metrics Reported
2013-05-27 13:59:50 by jdixon
There's been many a time when I've asked the question "I wonder how many hosts are sending this metric?" Unfortunately there's no built-in Graphite function for determining the number of hosts submitting a particular metric (or tree of metrics). But this morning I stumbled across a brilliant hack of a Graphite query by Jesse Newland (@jnewland) for rendering this value.
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WTF is Chartroulette
2013-05-13 16:32:42 by jdixon
Sometimes the silliest features are the ones that inspire you most. This was certainly the case with the new Chartroulette view that I recently merged into Descartes. Because I wanted so badly for this to become a reality it forced me to knock out some other dependencies (user model, favorite dashboards, and better user mapping) rather quickly.
To be fair, there's nothing silly about the idea behind Chartroulette. At GitHub we have an internal app by @maddox that allows users to rotate any Mac or iOS-based device's screen through a series of website URLs. Typically we use this to cycle through dashboards or graphs. While I'd love to see this open-sourced, I know that Jon is a very busy guy so I figured that emulating this functionality within Descartes might be the next best thing.
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Feeding Params into Descartes
2013-05-06 13:07:32 by jdixon
This is a relatively minor enhancement in terms of LoC but it would take too many words to describe on Twitter so here we are. Recent commits added support for passing interval and columns parameters into Descartes views (graphs, dashboards, etc). Previously you would always get the default layout whenever loading any Descartes page.
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Trip to Italy
2012-10-06 13:21:15 by jdixon
I've just concluded a week in Italy as part of my visit to speak at DevOpsDays Roma. Most people don't know this, but I was an Architecture student at Georgia Tech many years ago. As such, I was exposed to a lot of Greek and Roman history. This made a lasting impression on me; I've always dreamed of visiting Rome and it was a stroke of luck when I heard about the conference and was eventually accepted to speak.
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Introducing Descartes
2012-07-10 17:51:45 by jdixon
Graphite is renowned for its usefulness and ease for prototyping new charts. It's also known for having a dashboard component that leaves much to be desired. In response the community has seen a rising tide of new dashboard projects aimed at filling this gap. The growing list of third-party Graphite dashboard projects is extensive, but continues to fall short in areas such as self-service, configuration, and collaboration.
Most of this software require users to generate dashboards from JSON or other command-line gymnastics. While this is reasonable for many operations folk, it's an impedance for the engineers and business-oriented users; the same users that we want using this software for making sound decisions. Graph views are static and inflexible for collaboration and historical dialogues. In response to these shortcomings I've started the Descartes project.
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Collection of D3 Tutorials
2012-07-09 13:24:05 by jdixon
A friend of mine recently asked for some good D3 tutorials and sites. At second glance these are an awesome collection of examples for using D3 and general visualization work.
Pro: You don't have to scour the web for these yourself.
Con: It's unlikely you'll ever fully consume all the awesome.
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The State of Employment
2012-07-08 17:39:48 by jdixon
Seems that it's common for folks to blog about changes in employment. I hate to be left out on the fun, so I'll take a brief moment to officially announce my pending "new-hire" status with GitHub, effective tomorrow.
Friends who've already heard the news pepper their congratulations with a sense of confusion as to why I'd leave a good thing at Heroku. Indeed, I think most people in our industry would rank Heroku and GitHub at the top of their list of prospective employers. Unsurprisingly, I loved my job. I've never worked with a team of engineers as highly skilled or dedicated to their mission as the men and women at Heroku. So why would I leave?
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