Alternative storage finders

Built-in finders

The default graphite setup consists of:

  • A Whisper database
  • A carbon daemon writing data to the database
  • Graphite-web reading and graphing data from the database

It is possible to switch the storage layer to something different than Whisper to accommodate specific needs. The setup above would become:

  • An alternative database
  • A carbon daemon or alternative daemon for writing to the database
  • A custom storage finder for reading the data in graphite-web

This section aims at documenting the last item: configuring graphite-web to read data from a custom storage layer.

This can be done via the STORAGE_FINDERS setting. This setting is a list of paths to finder implementations. Its default value is:

STORAGE_FINDERS = (
    'graphite.finders.standard.StandardFinder',
)

The default finder reads data from a Whisper database.

An alternative finder for the experimental Ceres database is available:

STORAGE_FINDERS = (
    'graphite.finders.ceres.CeresFinder',
)

The setting supports multiple values, meaning you can read data from both a Whisper database and a Ceres database:

STORAGE_FINDERS = (
    'graphite.finders.standard.StandardFinder',
    'graphite.finders.ceres.CeresFinder',
)

Custom finders

STORAGE_FINDERS being a list of arbitrary python paths, it is relatively easy to write a custom finder if you want to read data from other places than Whisper and Ceres. A finder is a python class with a find_nodes() method:

class CustomFinder(object):
    def find_nodes(self, query):
        # ...

query is a FindQuery object. find_nodes() is the entry point when browsing the metrics tree. It must yield leaf or branch nodes matching the query:

from graphite.node import LeafNode, BranchNode

class CustomFinder(object):
    def find_nodes(self, query):
        # find some paths matching the query, then yield them
        for path in matches:
            if is_branch(path):
                yield BranchNode(path)
            if is_leaf(path):
                yield LeafNode(path, CustomReader(path))

LeafNode is created with a reader, which is the class responsible for fetching the datapoints for the given path. It is a simple class with 2 methods: fetch() and get_intervals():

from graphite.intervals import IntervalSet, Interval

class CustomReader(object):
    __slots__ = ('path',)  # __slots__ is recommended to save memory on readers

    def __init__(self, path):
        self.path = path

    def fetch(self, start_time, end_time):
        # fetch data
        time_info = _from_, _to_, _step_
        return time_info, series

    def get_intervals(self):
        return IntervalSet([Interval(start, end)])

fetch() must return a list of 2 elements: the time info for the data and the datapoints themselves. The time info is a list of 3 items: the start time of the datapoints (in unix time), the end time and the time step (in seconds) between the datapoints.

The datapoints is a list of points found in the database for the required interval. There must be (end - start) / step points in the dataset even if the database has gaps: gaps can be filled with None values.

get_intervals() is a method that hints graphite-web about the time range available for this given metric in the database. It must return an IntervalSet of one or more Interval objects.

Installing custom finders

In order for your custom finder to be importable, you need to package it under a namespace of your choice. Python packaging won’t be covered here but you can look at third-party finders to get some inspiration: