How would you respond to the criticisms of graphite in a previous graphite-themed HN thread? [1]
Some examples:
"FWIW I've found influxdb considerably easier to install and manage
than graphite (graphite doesn't play well with virtualenv, which
makes dependency management horrible, compared to influxdb's single
static binary)
Also, I can see logging dictionaries being much more efficient and
useful than logging single values -- with graphite if you want to
track page hits per section of your site (of which you have 10) per
user (100) per browser (5), you end up with 5000 individual metrics,
and you need to have thought of them in advance. With influxdb you
can log {"section": "front page", "user": "bob", "browser":
"firefox", "hits": 1} as a single metric and then use an SQL-like
query to filter by section / user / browser (or any combination of
those) as and when you want to."[2]
"I've spent the last week working on upgrading our Graphite
system. I ultimately killed it and went with InfluxDB. The ease of
installation and cluster creation were clear winners.
Additionally the storage options for Influx trump Graphite across
the board. I tried writing a custom backend and it went nowhere. The
docs and code are terrible. I also noticed that Ceres hasn't had a
commit in a year - kind of disheartening."[3]
"I haven't had the best experience with Graphite. Namely, our main
systems practically never crash but Graphite does fall over every
few months. Seriously, Graphite is less reliable than the systems we
use it to monitor."[4]
"We've had the same problems."[5]
"My biggest problem with Graphite was that it managed to grind an
expensive large RAID array into the ground with a relatively small
number (in my eyes) of metrics. We had the realisation that we'd
waste a tremendous amount of hardware or have to cut down
drastically on our data collection if we were to roll out Graphite
across the board.
(And yes, we had crashes too)
The reason for the disk grinding was simple: The whisper storage
system is ridiculously inefficient as it does tiny writes all over
the places, and an excessive number of system calls to boot."[6]
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8739784
[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8740058
[4] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8739391