Sending Data from ganglia to graphite

Question

I am currently collecting monitoring metrics with Ganglia and I would like to show graphs with that data with Graphite. I know such an integration is possible, and I found an article describing how it should be done. I am not quite sure exactly how this integration works, especially when I want to send it straight into graphite without parsing the data of the gmetad. Any help on how to integrate Ganglia with Graphite will be great.

thanks

Answer 1

Have you checked the ganglia-web wiki ? There is a section Graphite Integration and an other called Using Graphite as the graphing engine which explain well how to do what you want.

Answer 2

There are two approaches to integrate ganglia with graphite.

1. use third party process to get metrics from gmetad/gmond, tweak metrics data format, send metrics data to carbon server finally.
2. use the feature "graphite integration" of gmetad where you just need to configure the carbon server address, port, protocol (with an optional graphite path syntax), then gmetad will do all the things left. The more details can be found from your /etc/ganglia/gmetad.conf

I would recommend #2 since it's pretty simple. you just need to upgrade your ganglia packages to version 3.3+.

In above solutions, you can store metrics data in both RRD and whisper. If you don't want this approach, it also supports altering rrdtool graphs with graphite in ganglia-web. see "Using graphite as graphing engine"

Answer 3

I've worked a lot with Ganglia, Graphite from what I've researched works similarly. I was never able to master Whisper, but I've found RRD's (round robin databases) to be pretty reliable. Not sure what you're interested in monitoring, but I would definitely check out JMXtrans. You can get the code from Google. It provides multiple methods for extracting metric data from whatever JVM you're monitoring, and lets you define which metrics you'd like to pipe to Ganglia/Graphite, and some other options.