Example disk space, CPU and / or memory monitoring configuration for Graphite

Question

We are looking for a simple monitoring tool for basic stuff like disk space, CPU, folder sizes, memory usage.

Graphite looks promising. For a demo I want to create some example data to put in Graphite for one or more of such metrics.

What is best way to approach this. I have Graphite running in a Docker. How do I configure Graphite and send some test data to it? For example for

• daily disk space metrics
• daily folder sizes
• hourly CPU
• hourly memory

Answer 1

Graphite is not a data collector. From graphiteapp.org:

What Graphite is and is not.

Graphite does two things:

Store numeric time-series data

Render graphs of this data on demand

Graphite is not a collection agent, but it offers the simplest path for getting your measurements into a time-series database. Feeding your metrics into Graphite couldn't be any easier.

You will need a collector, Collectd and Telegraf seem to be popular choices at the moment but there are many others, see list of collectors. Disclosure: I contributed to both projects so might be biased.

Your intervals are very long, Graphite is usually used with way smaller intervals, 10s to 1m. I don't see why it won't work with intervals of hours though. Make sure to configure your storage-schemas.conf accordingly, the default setting is 1m.