Podcast.init

Graphite Metrics Stack with Jason Dixon and Dan Cech – Episode 136

Nov 19 '17

Summary

Do you know what is happening in your production systems right now? If you have a comprehensive metrics platform then the answer is yes. If your answer is no, then this episode is for you. Jason Dixon and Dan Cech, core maintainers of the Graphite project, talk about how graphite is architected to capture your time series data and give you the ability to use it for answering questions. They cover the challenges that have been faced in evolving the project, the strengths that have let it stand the tests of time, and the features that will be coming in future releases.

Preface

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Now is a good time to start planning your conference schedule for 2018. To help you out with that, guest Jason Dixon is offering a $100 discount for Monitorama in Portland, OR on June 4th – 6th and guest Dan Cech is offering a €50 discount to Grafanacon in Amsterdam, Netherlands March 1st and 2nd. There is also still time to get your tickets to PyCascades in Vancouver, BC Canada January 22nd and 23rd. All of the details are in the show notes
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Jason Dixon and Dan Cech about Graphite

Interview

Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is Graphite and how did you each get involved in the project?
Why should developers be thinking about collecting and reporting on metrics from their software and systems?
How do you think the Graphite project has contributed to or influenced the overall state of the art in systems monitoring?
There are a number of different projects that comprise a fully working Graphite deployment. Can you list each of them and describe how they fit together?
What are some of the early design choices that have proven to be problematic while trying to evolve the project?
What are some of the challenges that you have been faced with while maintaining and improving the various Graphite projects?
What will be involved in porting Graphite to run on Python 3?
If you were to start the project over would you still use Python?
What are the options for scaling Graphite and making it highly available?
Given the level of importance to a companies visibility into their systems, what development practices do you use to ensure that Graphite can operate reliably and fail gracefully?
What are some of the biggest competitors to Graphite?
When is Graphite not the right choice for tracking your system metrics?
What are some of the most interesting or unusual uses of Graphite that you are aware of?
What are some of the new features and enhancements that are planned for the future of Graphite?