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Send or visualize Graphite metrics

Grafana Labs’s metrics service offers a graphite-compatible monitoring backend-as-a-service. It behaves like a regular Graphite data source within Grafana (or other tools), but behind the scenes, it is a sophisticated platform run by a team of dedicated engineers.

Note

The Graphite metrics system is stable, but older and is not receiving major feature upgrades. If you are already using Graphite, these docs should be helpful.

Make sure to read the official Graphite documentation that is for the version that is specific to the release you are using. If you are deploying a new metrics stack and deciding what to use, we recommend Prometheus.

The main Graphite docs are the canonical source for information about Graphite. Graphite query functions are supported and available in the Grafana UI, whether using the Grafana Explore feature or writing queries for panels. The caveat is that functions that only exist in later Graphite releases will not be available if your Graphite installation is an older release.

Finding your API endpoints

The two endpoints you will use are provided on your Grafana Cloud Stack details page under “Graphite”.

The endpoints will look something like:

  • <ingest_endpoint> : https://something.grafana.net/graphite/metrics
  • <query_endpoint> : https://something.grafana.net/graphite

Sending Data

See Graphite Data Ingestion

Out-of-order ingestion support

By default, Cloud Graphite only accepts in-order samples that are within 1-2 hours of the newest sample received across all metrics. Cloud Graphite supports OOO ingestion, but it is not enabled by default. You can contact support to have it enabled for you. However, there are some caveats to be aware of:

  • The maximum recommended out-of-order time window is 10 hours. Cloud Graphite will compare the sample’s timestamp to the newest timestamps ingested across all metrics; if this difference is larger than the window, the sample is rejected. The size of the window can be adjusted depending on your needs.
  • Overriding samples is not supported. Sending multiple samples for the same timestamp leads to undefined behavior and should be avoided. This differs from stock Graphite, which will override previous samples with new ones.
  • For performance reasons there is a cache in front of the query path configured to cache the last 10 minutes of data. This means that if a series gets OOO data while it’s also being queried, the results may not reflect all the OOO points being received until the cached results expire.

To learn more, see Understand out-of-order.

The Discarded Metric Samples panel on your Billing/Usage dashboard shows you if any of your samples are being rejected due to the out-of-order constraints.

Grafana data source configuration

Your Hosted Grafana instance has an automatically provisioned Graphite data source that connects to your Graphite instance in the same stack. However, if you need to set up a data source manually, see the Grafana Graphite data source documentation for configuration instructions.