Graphite

While Munin is nice because it is robust and fairly easy to start using, the graphs it provides are only updated once in a while, normally every fifth minute. There is therefore a niche for a tool that does graphing that is closer to real time. Graphite is such a tool.

The Graphite stack consists of the following three major parts. It is similar to both Ganglia and Munin but uses its own component implementations.

• The Graphite Web component, which is a web application that renders a user interface consisting of graphs and dashboards organized within a tree-like browser widget
• The Carbon metric processing daemon, which gathers the metrics
• The Whisper time series database library

As such, the Graphite stack is similar in utility to both Munin and Ganglia. Unlike Munin and Ganglia though, it uses its own time series library, Whisper, rather than an RRD.

There are several prepackaged Docker images for trying out Graphite. We can use the sitespeedio/graphite image from the Docker Hub, as...