Installing Graphite for use with NAV on Debian¶

Getting Graphite¶

A full Graphite setup consists of the Carbon backend server, which receives metrics over TCP or UDP, and a Graphite web frontend, which enables browsing and retrievial/rendering of the stored metrics. NAV will collect metrics and send to the former, while utilizing the latter to retrieve metrics and render graphs.

Assuming you will be running Graphite on the same Debian server as you are running NAV, all you need to do to install Graphite is:

apt-get install -t stretch-backports/graphite-carbon graphite-web

Job for carbon-cache.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status carbon-cache.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
invoke-rc.d: initscript carbon-cache, action "start" failed.
● carbon-cache.service - Graphite Carbon Cache
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/carbon-cache.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon 2019-01-28 10:55:45 CET; 13ms ago
  Process: 3142 ExecStart=/usr/bin/carbon-cache --config=/etc/carbon/carbon.conf --pidfile=/var/run/carbon-cache.pid --logdir=/var/log/carbon/ start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver carbon-cache[3142]:     config.parseOptions(twistd_options)
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver carbon-cache[3142]:   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/twisted/application/app.py", line 624,…seOptions
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver carbon-cache[3142]:     usage.Options.parseOptions(self, options)
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver carbon-cache[3142]:   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/twisted/python/usage.py", line 270, in…seOptions
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver carbon-cache[3142]:     raise UsageError("Unknown command: %s" % sub)
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver carbon-cache[3142]: twisted.python.usage.UsageError: Unknown command: carbon-cache
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver systemd[1]: carbon-cache.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver systemd[1]: Failed to start Graphite Carbon Cache.
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver systemd[1]: carbon-cache.service: Unit entered failed state.
Jan 28 10:55:45 myserver systemd[1]: carbon-cache.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.

Configuring Carbon¶

Carbon, the metric-receiving backend of Graphite, must be configured before it can be used with NAV. We will only be covering the simple case of using a single carbon-cache process. Most of this information is adapted from the Integrating Graphite with NAV section of the generic installation documentation.

Edit /etc/carbon/carbon.conf to ensure these options are set in the [cache] section:

MAX_CREATES_PER_MINUTE = inf
ENABLE_UDP_LISTENER = True

The first line ensures that Carbon will not delay creating Whisper backend files for the metrics NAV sends it. The default setting is a maximum of 50 creates per minute (the setting exists to limit I/O strain on huge setups), which means that when bootstrapping a NAV installation, hours to days can pass before all its metrics are being actually stored in Graphite.

The second line ensures that Carbon accepts metrics on a UDP socket, which is required by NAV.

Carbon also needs to know the resolution at which to store your time-series data, for how long to store it, and how to roll up data from high resolution data archives to lower resolution archives. These are the storage schemas and aggregation methods. NAV provides its own config examples for this; on a Graphite backend dedicated to NAV, you can simply symlink these config files from NAV:

cd /etc/carbon/
mv storage-schemas.conf storage-schemas.conf.bak
mv storage-aggregation.conf storage-aggregation.conf.bak
ln -s /etc/nav/graphite/*.conf /etc/carbon/

Finally, restart the carbon-cache daemon:

systemctl restart carbon-cache

Configuring the Graphite web interface¶

To enable the web interface, you need to do two things:

• Configure and create the database it will use for storing graph definitions.
• Configure Apache to serve the web interface.

sudo -u postgres createuser --pwprompt --no-createrole --no-superuser --no-createdb --login graphite
sudo -u postgres createdb --owner=graphite graphite

$ makepasswd --chars 51
iLNScMiUpNy5hditWAp9e2dyHGTFoX44UKsbhj91f9xL4fdJSDY

SECRET_KEY = 'iLNScMiUpNy5hditWAp9e2dyHGTFoX44UKsbhj91f9xL4fdJSDY'
TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Oslo' # This should correspond to your actual timezone, also as in nav.conf
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'NAME': 'graphite',
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
        'USER': 'graphite',
        'PASSWORD': 'the password you made note of above',
        'HOST': 'localhost',
        'PORT': '5432'
    }
}

graphite-manage migrate auth --noinput
graphite-manage migrate --noinput

Listen 8000
<VirtualHost *:8000>

        WSGIDaemonProcess _graphite processes=1 threads=1 display-name='%{GROUP}' inactivity-timeout=120 user=_graphite group=_graphite
        WSGIProcessGroup _graphite
        WSGIImportScript /usr/share/graphite-web/graphite.wsgi process-group=_graphite application-group=%{GLOBAL}
        WSGIScriptAlias / /usr/share/graphite-web/graphite.wsgi

        Alias /content/ /usr/share/graphite-web/static/
        <Location "/content/">
                SetHandler None
        </Location>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/graphite-web_error.log

        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
        # alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn

        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/graphite-web_access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

a2ensite graphite-web
systemctl restart apache2