Summarizing Graphite Events

Graphite is also great for measuring things that could be considered "events". This could be something like a login failure, file creation, terminated EC2 instance. Etc.

To insert these type of metrics into graphite, simply give them the value 1:

echo events.cfengine.push 1 `date +%s` | nc graphs.xkyle.com 2003

Use the drawAsInfinite function to make these events show up as straight lines.

https://graphs.xkyle.com/render/?target=drawAsInfinite%28events.cfengine.push%29&from=-24hours

Or to see them over time, summarize and group them into say, 1 day buckets:

summarize(sumSeries(group(events.cfengine.push)), "1d")

Converting Metrics Into Events

You can take any metric and convert it into an event by dividing itself. (normalizing the metric to be "1"):

divideSeries(metrics.time_it_took_to_transfer,metrics.time_it_took_to_transfer)

Every time there is a transfer, no matter how long it took, it will be a "1". Now sum those, and then summarizing them, say per hour:

summarize(sumSeries(divideSeries(metrics.time_it_took_to_transfer,metrics.time_it_took_to_transfer)), '1h')

Now you have a graph of transfers per hour.

References

http://obfuscurity.com/2012/04/Unhelpful-Graphite-Tip-1 http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/