Graphite project consists of three components that designed to work together:

• carbon daemon that accepts and stores metrics
• whisper database where metrics are kept
• web app that reads metrics and processes them using a comprehensive list of supported functions

Every component exposes several APIs that are used by other components. All of them are written in Python.

Two more components are often used together with Graphite:

• StatsD — a Node.js app that accepts metrics and aggregates them before submitting to carbon;
• Grafana — web dashboard for Graphite (and other backends)

This set of images replaces original carbon daemon and StatsD aggregation daemon with other compatible components to improve performance and throughput.

Grafana 4 is also included.

Make sure Docker and Docker Compose are installed.

$ make graphite fast

$ make graphite fast again

$ make run

• Open Grafana dashboard at http://[docker-host]:3000/, sign in as admin/admin
• Create new data source of type Graphite that points to http://graphite-api:8000
• Create a new chart with a test metric (test.ping in this example)
• Start sending metrics to StatsD-compatible endpoint
• Metrics should show up on Grafana dashboard

You can send metrics right from terminal:

# 1000 times
# Send "test.ping:1|C\n"
# Verbose, Using UDP, Timeout 1s
# To StatsD port on Docker
$ for i in {1..1000}; do echo "test.ping:1|C" | nc -v -u -w1 `docker-machine ip` 8126; done

Data is kept in /data/graphite/whisper directory on the host machine.