Graphing Metrics

At work, we have a lot of metrics. These really help us diagnose problems when things go South. On of the conventions is that every server exposes a URL for metrics in plain text, where every line is in the format "metric: value".

You can track a metric simply by running

watch 'curl -s localhost:8001/metrics | grep metric2'

However this will only bring you the current value. I personally prefer graphs, so I wrote this little Clojure application that let you pick URLs and metrics to follow, then displays graphs for these metrics. It's a small web server where the UI is the browser (which will open automagically when you run the program).

Here's the main screen:

And here's the configuration screen

What's nice about this project is that you can build a single "uberjar" and give it away to people.

Technologies used:

• Compojure + Ring + Hiccup as web stack
• H2 database (with clojure.contrib.sql)
• Database files at ~/.metrics.*.db
• jQuery and jQuery UI
• flot for client side charting

As usual, the sources at at bitbucket

(Note that the demo server there also have a dummy /metrics handler that generate random metrics).