Fedora 4 comes with built-in profiling machinery that keeps track of how many times specific services have been requested, how long each request takes to be serviced, etc. There are presently two ways of visualizing the output of this "metrics" collection.

• Graphite graphing server
• JMX

This guide is designed to help you install and configure a Graphite instance. The directions below are based on the instructions provided by Graphite.

Prerequisites

You will need the following software pre-installed:

1. Apache HTTPD
2. mod_wsgi
3. Cairo
4. Python (2.6, 2.7)
5. Django (1.6)
6. Various Python modules
   1. pycairo
   2. django-tagging
   3. json or simplejson

On a Debian system, the following commands should install the above.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git -y
sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork -y
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi -y
sudo apt-get install python-cairo -y
sudo apt-get install python2.7 -y
sudo apt-get install python-django -y
sudo apt-get install python-django-tagging -y
sudo apt-get install python-simplejson -y

Graphite modules

Setup Whisper, Carbon and Graphite-web

Clone the GitHub repositories (use either the 0.9.x [stable] branch or master [unstable/alpha] branch).

Note: The source files found at https://launchpad.net/graphite/+download/ are very out of date and do not support Django versions greater than 1.4.

On an Linux-based system, the following commands should get the correct branches of the three Graphite modules.

cd
git clone https://github.com/graphite-project/whisper.git
git clone https://github.com/graphite-project/carbon.git
git clone https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web.git
pushd carbon/
git checkout 0.9.x
popd;pushd graphite-web
git checkout 0.9.x
popd;pushd whisper
git checkout 0.9.x
popd

Your starting directory may look something like the following.

ls -l /home/ubuntu
drwxrwxr-x  9 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Sep 18 20:59 carbon/
drwxrwxr-x 11 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Sep 18 20:59 graphite-web/
drwxrwxr-x  4 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Sep 18 20:59 whisper/

Install whisper

cd whisper
sudo python setup.py install
cd ..

Install Carbon

cd carbon
sudo python setup.py install
cd ..

This installs to /opt/graphite by default.

Install Graphite-web

Check for any fatal errors and resolve them, (ie. missing modules, libraries). There are 3 warnings that can be ignored (they are related to optional features).

cd graphite-web
sudo python check-dependencies.py

Install

sudo python setup.py install
cd ..

Configure Graphite

cd /opt/graphite
sudo chown -R ubuntu:ubuntu *
cd /opt/graphite/conf
cp carbon.conf.example carbon.conf
cp storage-schemas.conf.example storage-schemas.conf
cp graphite.wsgi.example graphite.wsgi

This setups up a default data retention period of gathering data every second and storing it for 1 day. You can configure this by editing the storage-schemas.conf file.

Configure Apache

There is an Apache Virtual Hosts file provided in the graphite-web/examples directory. You can use this to configure your Apache installation.

Things to pay attention to in this file:

1. WSGISocketPrefix run/wsgi

   this needs to be set to a directory that the webserver can write to and can be either a relative or an absolute path.

2. Both the <Location "/content/"> and <Location "/media/"> do not specify access. You may need to add them.

   ie.

   <Location "/content/">
     SetHandler None
   </Location>

   to

   <Location "/content/">
     SetHandler None
     Order deny,allow
     Allow from all
   </Location>
       

Setup Database

By default Graphite uses a sqlite3 database, but you can configure it to use a MySQL, Postgresql or Oracle database instead.

cd /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite
cp local_settings.py.example local_settings.py

Then edit local_setttings.py, to uncomment:

• SECRET_KEY
• Logging section

SECRET_KEY = 'UNSAFE_DEFAULT <or your own value>'
...
# Logging
LOG_RENDERING_PERFORMANCE = True
LOG_CACHE_PERFORMANCE = True
LOG_METRIC_ACCESS = True

• Optional: If you are NOT using a sqlite3 database, find the DATABASES variable, un-comment it and change the ENGINE parameter and add required parameters (username, password, hostname, port).

Create the database

cd /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite
sudo python manage.py syncdb

• If you are using the default sqlite3 database, create an administrator <username> and <password> when prompted and then re-open local_settings.py, un-comment the DATABASES variable and add the administrator username/password to the DATABASES variable.

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'NAME': '/opt/graphite/storage/graphite.db',
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'USER': '<username>',
        'PASSWORD': '<password>',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': ''
    }
}

• Note: If you receive an error "ImportError: cannot import name execute_manager", you have an old version of graphite-web that requires Django 1.4. Get the latest changes from the GitHub repositories.

Set the permissions of the entire storage directory (default /opt/graphite/storage) and all files to be owned by the webserver process.

cd /opt/graphite/storage
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .

Start Data Collector

cd /opt/graphite/bin/
sudo -u www-data python carbon-cache.py start
> Starting carbon-cache (instance a)

This starts the listener on localhost:2003, this can be configured in /opt/graphite/conf/carbon.conf.

Note: If you receive the message:

'WHISPER_FALLOCATE_CREATE is enabled but linking failed.'

This can be disabled by setting

WHISPER_FALLOCATE_CREATE = False

in /opt/graphite/conf/carbon.conf but this will not harm the running process and does not need to be disabled.

Stronger security

Note: If you are not running the carbon-cache.py daemon as root, then you will need to make the /opt/graphite/storage/whisper directory writable by whichever user you will run carbon-cache.py as.

sudo chown -R ubuntu /opt/graphite/storage/whisper

For example: If you are running Apache as www-data and the carbon-cache.py as ubuntu then your /opt/graphite/storage directory will look like

> ls -l /opt/graphite/storage
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data     5 Sep  8 21:46 carbon-cache-a.pid
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 69632 Sep  8 21:50 graphite.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   762 Sep  8 21:50 index
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data  4096 Sep  8 21:40 lists/
drwxr-xr-x 4 www-data www-data  4096 Sep  8 21:46 log/
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data  4096 Sep  8 21:40 rrd/
drwxr-xr-x 5 ubuntu   www-data  4096 Sep 10 18:19 whisper/

This will allow carbon-cache.py to add new metrics to the whisper tables and still allow the web application to read them.

Restart Apache

sudo service apache2 restart

If all is well then browsing to your webserver's homepage should look something like this.

Connecting Fedora

To enable Metrics reporting to Graphite, activate the Spring profile metrics.graphite. The system properties fcrepo.metrics.host (defaults to localhost) and fcrepo.metrics.port (defaults to 2003) can also be set.

When testing with Maven use

MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx512m -Dspring.profiles.active=metrics.graphite" mvn jetty:run

or add it to the web.xml

<context-param>
  <param-name>spring.profiles.active</param-name>
  <param-value>metrics.graphite</param-value>
</context-param>

Connecting Fedora to a remote Graphite server

To enable metrics collection on a remote server use the above configuration for Graphite (by default Graphite is very open).

For Fedora you can add the hostname/IP address and port (if different from the default).

When using Maven:

MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx512m -Dspring.profiles.active=metrics.graphite -Dfcrepo.metrics.host=remote-host -Dfcrepo.metrics.port=2003" mvn jetty:run

10 Sep 2014: fcrepo.metrics.host does not seem to work as a <context-param> - Jared Whiklo

Once Fedora 4 is connected to your Graphite server, the Graphite console should resemble the following:

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