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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

is it just me or is graphite a HUGE pain in the ass to setup? is there a better option for these graphs. I really want to use statsd in a few projects but it looks like im going to have to set aside 8 hours to figure out how graphite works (and i am a django developer)

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I set up Graphite+StatsD for a project back in the spring of 2011, it was a ton of trouble. StatsD was easy, but Graphite was really hard. It was a challenge to find up-to-date documentation where big sections weren't marked simply "TODO". I also never solved a bug where my counters were getting graphed as tiny numbers like 0.02 rather than 1, despite repeatedly wiping the box and experimenting with different config settings. Things seemed to be a little better about 6 months later, but I still couldn't solve the 0.02 problem. I love the simplicity of StatsD, and I liked how Graphite let me use the URL API to build very useful dashboards for both technical and business metrics, but the setup was a big hassle. I spent days fighting with it, a big cost for a startup. I'd use StatsD again, but with a different database/frontend, probably something hosted.

If you're looking to use Graphite but don't want to manage it yourself then I highly recommend hostedgraphite.com. I and many friends at other companies use them and are very happy with the service. They're smart guys.

Thanks Patrick!

Clickable link: https://www.hostedgraphite.com

(I'm one of the cofounders)

fuck yes!

If you don't want to set up graphite and don't mind paying for a service, I've really enjoyed using Scout. (http://scoutapp.com) Cron jobs report to their app every 3 minutes and they have very nice ad-hoc graphs. They also have some indispensable configurable triggers that have saved us multiple times.

So I'm not being snarky in the least bit. Seriously. I'm just sharing.

I got graphite going on an Ubuntu installed on my macbook while in the air between SFO and ATL.

Literally, discovered it, downloaded it, and graphing metrics before we landed.

Now, that was, I think, in 2010. The last time I installed Graphite was a few months ago, and it seems like they have split the project up a bit. It took a bit longer.

NB: I'm neither a Python or Django 'guy'

I've been using StumbleUpon's OpenTSDB (http://opentsdb.net) with much success, and it looks like StatsD could easily be modified to work with it. The biggest pain with OpenTSDB I've had is that it requires an HBase/Hadoop backend, but a standalone, single-node install isn't terrible to setup.

There are other graphing frontends now, but also you can check out companies like Librato who have statsd-compatible backends and do all the graphing and storage for you.

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