Carbon and Graphite

Oct 1, 2017

Goal

We will install carbon and graphite to log and access metrics about our devices. This will allow us to emit the RSSI values in an easily accessible manner.

What you need

A Raspberry Pi with a Bluetooth adapter
A Bluetooth LE tracking device
The scripts from the previous blog post

Installing Carbon

 sudo apt-get install graphite-carbon

Next we will edit /etc/default/graphite-carbon to set the following value.

CARBON_CACHE_ENABLED=true

And start the carbon service.

sudo service carbon-cache start

No we will install required dependencies then the graphite-api

 sudo apt-get install python python-pip build-essential python-dev libcairo2-dev libffi-dev
 sudo pip install graphite-api

We will create a file /etc/graphite-api.yaml with the following content:

search_index: /var/lib/graphite/index
finders:
  - graphite_api.finders.whisper.WhisperFinder
functions:
  - graphite_api.functions.SeriesFunctions
  - graphite_api.functions.PieFunctions
whisper:
  directories:
    - /var/lib/graphite/whisper
carbon:
  hosts:
    - 127.0.0.1:7002
  timeout: 1
  retry_delay: 15
  carbon_prefix: carbon
  replication_factor: 1

Almost there!

 sudo apt-get install apache2
 sudo apt-get install apache2-dev
 sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi
 sudo pip install mod_wsgi

Next create /var/www/wsgi-scripts/graphite-api.wsgi

   sudo mkdir -p /var/www/wsgi-scripts/
	 sudo vim /var/www/wsgi-scripts/graphite-api.wsgi

  # /var/www/wsgi-scripts/graphite-api.wsgi
	from graphite_api.app import app as application

  sudo mkdir -p /etc/apache2/sites-available
	sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/graphite.conf

# /etc/apache2/sites-available/graphite.conf
	LoadModule wsgi_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_wsgi.so
	WSGISocketPrefix /var/run/wsgi
	Listen 8013
	<VirtualHost *:8013>

 WSGIDaemonProcess graphite-api processes=5 threads=5 display-name='%{GROUP}' inactivity-timeout=120
 WSGIProcessGroup graphite-api
 WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
 WSGIImportScript /var/www/wsgi-scripts/graphite-api.wsgi process-group=graphite-api application-group=%{GLOBAL}

 WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/wsgi-scripts/graphite-api.wsgi

 <Directory /var/www/wsgi-scripts/>
 Order deny,allow
 Allow from all
 </Directory>
 </VirtualHost>

Create a symlink:

  sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
	cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
	sudo ln -s ../sites-available/graphite.conf .

We just need to start our service.

service apache2 restart

Checking our work

Navigate to your local host http://:8013/render

You should see a nice

	{"errors": {"target": "This parameter is required."}}

Let’s populate some metrics! Create a file with the contents below. We will call it metricsLogger.py:

import sys
import time
import socket

sock = socket.socket()
metric = sys.argv[1]
value = int (sys.argv[2])

sock.connect( ("localhost", 2003) )
sock.send("%s %d %d \n" % (metric, value, time.time()))
sock.close()
print("%s %d %d \n" % (metric, value, time.time()))

Then run the command

python metricsLogger.py testMetric 1

Now you can navigate to http://<yourHost>:8013/render?target=test.metric and see a graph with a single data point.

Congratulations! You are now logging metrics and making them available with graphite and carbon!

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Carbon and Graphite

Goal

What you need

Installing Carbon

Checking our work