Graphite

graphs not updating properly

Asked by Tim jones

I am having some issues when updating graphs. Basically I have a retention set for one f minute precision for 30 days. I have about 4 days worth of data. A couple of things.

1. I often get permission denied javascript errors when selecting a time range. It seems to be happen most going from hours to days.
2. It seems like the x-axis always shows the same time range between hours and days. The graph looks the same for 24 hours as it does for 3 days. The x-axis appears to only be showing 2 hours.
3. When I select the date range it only seems to update on the first dates I select. Also like the second one day looks like 3 days. Also the end time can only be the current day or I get a broken image. For instance graph works if choose July12 -July15 but not July12-July14.

Any ideas what might be going. Especially why 24 hours appears the same as 2 days.

thanks
Tim Jones

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chrismd (chrismd) said : 		#1

So this is a common point of confusion. Graphite's default retention configuration is 2 hours of minutely data (though I've upped this to 2 days of minutely retention for the next release). What happened was that you sent some data into Graphite, which caused the database files to be created with the retention that was configured at that time (2 hours). Then you probably updated the retention configuration and sent more data. The problem is that the storage schemas are only used during the *creation* of database files, they are not dynamically updated after they are created. So because you had already sent data, database files were already created with the default retention of 2 hours. The solution for now is to delete the .wsp files for your metrics which are located under $GRAPHITE_ROOT/storage/whisper/. Once you delete the files and send more data, they will get re-created with the currently defined schema. You shouldn't need to restart carbon, it picks up updates to the schemas file on the fly.

The reason this caused the strange issues you see is because there is only 2 hours of data being stored, so trying to look at the last 2 days or 2 months will both show you only the last 2 hours because that is all that exists. I need to put some better documentation in place to make this caveat more apparent. Later today I'm going to put out a new release and it will include a script for resizing whisper database files, so that would help if you already had data you did not want to lose.

One other thing, I have not seen javascript permission denied errors before. If you can reproduce that problem I would love to fix it. Could you open a bug and maybe attach a screen shot of the error?

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Tim jones (tjones-bottomline) said : 		#2

ok the real problem is that I have been using a file called schemas.default which was there default. For whatever reason I did not think to change that to just schemas so that the carbon-persister saw it. I will check and see if I still get javascript errors now that I have this setup correctly.

thanks
Tim Jones