How to Set Up Metric Collection Using Graphite and Statsd on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

I know developers are used to setting stuff up in local environments, but that guide's about 20 steps too many. It would be nice to have an apt package built that encapsulates the operations in that script.<p>And is it really necessary to install Git just to download some software? The devs should make a tarball out of the 0.3.0 tag and follow standard packaging conventions. /opt/ is for 3rd-party/proprietary stuff or "really big crap" like KDE/Gnome (if you're on certain distros).<p>If the generation gap between modern developers and Linux package-managing folk is too big, i'll gladly write up some guides that explain how (and why) to package software instead of slapdash local installs.

Excuse the blatant advertising (I contracted with these guys), but Librato Metrics is intended to work like 'Graphite as SaaS' so you don't have to go through this crazy process. They also subscribe to the thought that your metrics should be separate from your production infrastructure -- otherwise when your servers melt your graphing server melts too :). Obviously if you want to stay pure open source then this won't apply, but otherwise it's a pretty neat service. <a href="https://metrics.librato.com/" rel="nofollow">https://metrics.librato.com/</a> and <a href="https://github.com/librato" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/librato</a>

Graphite is a nice piece of software, but with an absurdly confusing architecture and setup. You have to setup 3 different applications (graphite, carbon and whisper) to have a working server, but you're on your on - there's no comprehensive documentation. Also, I have no idea why it ships with 4 different user interfaces, of which 3 are semi-broken, or why it doesn't adopt RRD as it's default storage (since it <i>can</i> read RRD files if you symlink them). It could be refactored to be <i>only</i> a REST interface for graphing and be just as useful.

You also may want to have something like this in storage-aggregation:<p><pre><code> [stats_counts] pattern = ^stats_counts\..* xFilesFactor = 0.25 aggregationMethod = sum </code></pre> Otherwise stats_counts get averaged at compaction/rotation, instead of summed. Summing seemed more reasonable, for our use cases at least.

I wanted to use Graphite+statsd, but the docs were really sparse.<p>I sticked to Munin for the time being.