Graphite

Has anyone used both Circonus and Graphite?

Asked by Carolyn Bray

Hello all,
They use Circonus here and I've been test driving Graphite and I've been very impressed with it, but Circonus isn't too bad either. Has anyone used both and have you details on the differences (pros/cons) you've found? Trying to make a balanced fair choice, but right now, the main difference seems to be internal vs external data storage. If you have feelings, I'm due to show both later today, so hope you respond fast.

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Jason Dixon
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Best Jason Dixon (jason-dixongroup) said : 		#1

I'm in the fairly unique situation of being the former Product Manager for Circonus and currently a developer/user of Graphite.

At the surface they do a similar task... trending your data. But the similarities end there. There are so many different considerations, that it's hard to compare the two. So I'll just rattle off some things off the top of my head and perhaps elaborate on them if you have further questions.

P.S. Personally I see Librato Metrics as a much closer comparison to Graphite.

Circonus:
hosted commercial SaaS
developed as a value-added alternative to Reconnoiter (open-source trending app)
intended to be a "one-stop shop" for all of your monitoring/trending/alerting needs
push or pull metrics to the service
excellent trending and capacity planning capabilities (overlays, regressions, realtime visualizations, etc)
distributed global collection agents
alerting and notification systems
custom dashboards + widgets

Graphite:
standalone open-source project (also offered as SaaS version by http://hostedgraphite.com/)
developed by Orbitz to handle high-volume of metrics
intended as a highly scalable real-time graphing system, making it easy to store and make sense of your metrics
push metrics to the service
excellent prototyping UI
installation can be challenging to beginners
many open-source collection and alerting components are designed to interact with it
built-in basic dashboard component
large ecosystem of open-source dashboard projects that support it

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Carolyn Bray (cbray) said : 		#2

Thanks. That helps. I'm looking for a tool that will help us with real-time troubleshooting and I've gotten the impression that Circonus is better at the trending than it is at giving me a real time view on how the system is doing. We have servlet execution times we are trying to monitor and Circonus seems to "smooth" out the very points that I want to spot and investigate. We've got good developers. And I've moved data into graphite and have been pleased. I do like Circonus' event logging and I like the fact that I can hover over a spot and get the actual data value. I don't seem to be able to do those two things in Graphite. I'm not certain that Circonus can go down to one minute data graphing - which is really where I need to be.

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Jason Dixon (jason-dixongroup) said : 		#3

You can definitely do those things _with_ Graphite, but not _in_ Graphite. As I mentioned, there are a lot of external dashboard/UI projects that use Graphite's API. I suspect that one of those may do what you need.

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Carolyn Bray (cbray) said : 		#4

Thanks Jason Dixon, that solved my question.

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Dieter P (dieter-plaetinck) said : 		#5

for event logging, there's:
* the "events" support in graphite (but it's IMHO a bit of a hack, i don't know many people using it). I don't know if it supports text description data. i also don't know if there's any docs for it.
* logstash, if you have a large volume of (different) log events and wish to search through them/do analytics etc, comes with various processing utilities to make sense out of loose data. it's gaining a lot of traction
* anthracite, a simple event database I wrote to manage a specific set of events (deploys, changes, etc) and which aims for easy integration in plots.

for hoovering over graph and seeing values, I implemented that in https://github.com/Dieterbe/graphitejs (currently only for rickshaw backend, for flot backend (recommended) it's WIP). I wrote this because I couldn't find anything open source to generate client-side interactive graphite graphs. this aims to be an reusable component that many dashboards can leverage. it happens to also support showing events from anthracite.