Show HN: Giraffe - dashboard for graphite | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Giraffe - dashboard for graphite

kenhub.github.com

45 pointsgingerlime15 comments

This looks great. I use a modified version of gdash, but always wish that the graphs were rendered in D3 instead.

At first glance, it seems like the configuration could be a little more expressive for some common use cases. For instance, it seems pretty typical to build graphs that are collections of stats from different regions/instances from a set of metrics that have the form: stats.<machine/region>.specific_stat.

One nice thing about gdash is the ability to define a list of instances/regions and their readable name mappings, which you can then easily build multiple graphs for different stats using.

Seems like that'd be a little trickier here.

That's an interesting idea. I'd have to take a closer look at the gdash dsl and see if I can borrow/steal some ideas.

Can you please explain the difference between this and using the built-in graphite target wildcards? e.g. you can specify

  stats.*.specific_stat

and graphite (and giraffe) will output all matching targets for you. Another alternative is

  stats.{one,another}.specific_stat

Those work 'out-of-the-box' with graphite and giraffe currently. Or are you talking about something different?

I need to be able to define consistent labels and colors for machines across multiple graphs. So a machine named 'uk' is always displayed 'London' in dark green, consistently across all graphs.

hmmm... I can see why this would be useful. Not entirely sure how is best to implement such a thing. Perhaps it's better to open a github issue so this can be discussed properly rather than here?

This should now be supported with Giraffe.

While this looks cool, what the obsession with making new Graphite dashboards recently? Everyone seems to be making one.

Can't comment for everyone, but as I tried to explain why on the readme: Essentially, none of the existing dashboards did exactly what we wanted, and it was fun to try to build something different. The task was made easier by using some elements and ideas from at least some of the existing dashboards, like tasseo, gdash and graphene (each worth a look in its own right and they might be more suitable for some people).

Happy to answer any questions about the project and would love to get some feedback.

Looks great! We've been having a rough time keeping our homegrown dashboard stable. My only suggestion so far is to build out the configuration/installation docs in the README.md, 'see dashboard.js' isn't very helpful.

Thanks for the suggestion. I think (or hope) that the config in dashboards.js is reasonably easy to follow, and to use giraffe you'd have to edit it anyway. So the info is right there when you need it. However, I can see that this might not be that clear on first sight.

Looking at it more, it seems pretty easy, but perhaps consider that your audience might only have a cursory knowledge of their Graphite implementation. Maybe point to a couple of the important fields in dashboards.js, like graphite_url and the bits inside metrics?

That sounds like a sensible idea. Thanks. I'll try to update the readme soon with perhaps a short snippet from dashboards.js.

Great one. Keep up the good work.

nice work, and +1 for the name ;)

*geraffe.

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