The Hosted Graphite Agent

Our agent is a simple way to get your metrics into Hosted Graphite. You install it on your machines, and it collects and forwards the system’s metrics for you.

If you have any questions about the agent, get in touch.

Contents

• The Hosted Graphite Agent

  • Installation

    • Platforms

  • How it Works

    • Features

  • Dashboards

    • Agent list

    • Base system metrics

  • Configuration

    • Optional Configuration

      • Metric path prefix

      • Proxies

      • Local Metric Receiver / Forwarder

      • Dedicated environments

      • MongoDB

  • Troubleshooting

  • Source Code

  • Uninstall

  • References

Installation

Get started by pulling down our installer script.

For Debian-based systems, including Ubuntu:

curl -s https://[e-mail]/agent/installer/deb/ | sudo sh

or for RHEL-based systems:

curl -s https://[e-mail]/agent/installer/rpm/ | sudo sh

If you would like to set up installation and configuration via Puppet, Chef, or a similar configuration management system, see our repository install instructions.

Once your agent is sending metrics, you will find it in your Agent list, along with a link to an auto-generated Base Metrics dashboard named Hosted Graphite Agent.

Platforms

We support the following stable OS releases on 64-bit machines:

• CentOS 7 forward (covering the RedHat family);

• Debian buster forward;

• Ubuntu 16.04 forward (LTS).

This should cover most installs on RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux, and Debian/Ubuntu family platforms.

How it Works

The Hosted Graphite agent is an easy-to-use bundle of the popular metrics collector Diamond and the Supervisor process manager along with an embedded build of Python and some support scripts.

Features

• Faster submission of metric data from your application because it doesn’t have to do a DNS lookup, or connect out across the internet.

• More reliable delivery because the agent stores-and-forwards, buffering on disk when it can’t connect.

• Easier debugging for the “my metric is missing” problem because our UI can tell you that an agent has stopped responding.

• More secure: the agent uses HTTPS and while we offer TLS-wrapped carbon protocols, it’s more effort to use than the plaintext ones. Sending straight to the agent bypasses this and we take care of it for you.

• No need to prefix your metrics with an API key for HG’s authentication: it’s handled for you, using the API key in the agent config.

• No need to specify new firewall rules for carbon protocols and keep the rules updated - if you can already get HTTPS out of your network, even via a proxy, then it’ll work.

For more details on how the agent works on your machines, see System Layout. The agent’s default metrics are listed and explained in Base Metrics.

Dashboards

Agent list

The Agent list provides an overview of all agents associated with your account. From here, you can view the status of each agent and other information.

The colored circle representing the State can take 3 values:

• Green: The agent is reporting normally at the correct time.

• Yellow: Agent has not reported in over 20 minutes, or is reporting with the wrong time.

• Red: The agent has reported errors in recent log messages.

An agent’s Clock Offset is the difference between the time reported by the agent and the time recorded on our server. Incorrect time can produce anomalies in metric data so it is advised to keep the agent’s clock accurate.

You can delete the record of an agent from this page, but be aware that this will not uninstall the agent. To uninstall an agent, use your package manager.

Base system metrics

Base system metrics dashboard

This dashboard can be located and uploaded from our Dashboard Library. It displays many of the metrics reported by the Hosted Graphite agent but can be customized further.

You can find descriptions of how to read the base system metrics dashboard at Base Metrics.

Configuration

Agent configuration is minimal and done via /etc/opt/hg-agent/hg-agent.conf. This is used to generate a more complete configuration for diamond in /var/opt/hg-agent/diamond.conf.

Typically hg-agent.conf contains only an api_key:

You can find the right value for this on your Hosted Graphite account page, but it should be filled in automatically by the simple installation process above.

Note that the agent takes control of diamond configuration: if you want more nuanced control, you can run a separate diamond instance or whatever metric collection system you wish. You can still take advantage of the agent’s authentication management and local buffering/forwarding facilities by configuring it to send Graphite data to localhost.

Optional Configuration

Metric path prefix

You can supply a custom prefix instead of hg_agent, e.g. to specify a host environment:

custom_prefix: hg_agent.prodenv

though keep in mind that the neat Base Metrics dashboard will no longer work for you.

You can also specify different methods of picking up the hostname, per hostname_method in Diamond’s config. By default the agent uses smart, but e.g. if you’d prefer the FQDN with . replaced by _:

Proxies

If your system requires a proxy to get HTTPS access to the Internet:

https_proxy: http://10.10.1.10:1080

Local Metric Receiver / Forwarder

If you would like the receiver to listen on something other than the default Carbon ports (defaults shown):

tcp_port: 2003
udp_port: 2003

If you’d like to keep more spool data for buffering locally during network outages (defaults shown):

max_spool_count: 10
spool_rotatesize: 10000000

Dedicated environments

Large customers with dedicated Hosted Graphite environments may need to specify metric data and metadata endpoints, e.g. for a cluster tst:

endpoint_url: https://tst.hostedgraphite.com/api/v1/sink
heartbeat_url: https://heartbeat-tst.hostedgraphite.com/beat

MongoDB

If you want the agent to monitor MongoDB on a host:

mongodb:
    enabled: True
    host: localhost
    port: 27017

You can specify any of the keys from Diamond’s MongoDB config here.

Troubleshooting

You can check whether your hg-agent is reporting metadata to Hosted Graphite via the Agent list, and from there you can use the Base Metrics dashboard to see if metric data is flowing in. If not, you may need to dig a little deeper.

Logs are in /var/log/hg-agent: you can see the metrics generated by diamond in archive.log, as well as the various daemon logs supervisord.log, diamond.log, periodic.log, and forwarder.log e.g.

tail -f /var/log/hg-agent/forwarder.log

Process structure and other details are described in System Layout.

You can inspect the agent as a service like any other, e.g. on Ubuntu trusty:

sudo service hg-agent status

If you’d like to look at things from the agent’s supervisor point of view:

sudo /opt/hg-agent/bin/supervisorctl --config=/etc/opt/hg-agent/supervisor.conf status

Source Code

The sources used to build the agent can be followed at:

• https://github.com/hostedgraphite/hg-agent

• https://github.com/hostedgraphite/hg-agent-periodic

• https://github.com/hostedgraphite/hg-agent-forwarder

and are licensed under an MIT license.

Versions of Supervisor & Diamond included can be found in the agent build scripts.

Uninstall

Hosted Graphite Agents can be uninstalled using your package manager.

For Debian-based systems:

sudo apt-get remove hg-agent

For RHEL-based systems:

sudo yum remove hg-agent

References

• Base Metrics

• System Layout