accumulation of value in Graphite

Question

I send one message each time a user connect to my site.

With this format:

"user_login 1 13xxxxxxx"  (key value timestamp)

My problem is Graphite give me a graph with only a line with the value "1", each minute. I send a random number of messages each minutes (between 6 and 60), but I think Graphite limits to the first (or last?) message, to display a value.

How to do to have an sum of each message, each minute ?

Answer 1

You could also try carbon aggregation service so that metrics are aggregated when they are collected instead of in the Graphite UI. See http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/config-carbon.html#aggregation-rules-conf for aggregation rule configuration. Note that you need to send the metrics to carbon aggregation service port that is running in different port than the normal carbon collector port.

Answer 2

You might be interested in running statsd or statsite on your graphite server. That software will aggregate all statistics per a configurable time period, and write the result out to graphite.

Take a look at github.com/etsy/statsd (in node.js) and github.com/kiip/statsite (python clone). Etsy's statsd contains a few code examples on how to use it.