Having trouble getting accurate numbers from graphite - graphite

I have an application that publishes a number of stats to graphite via statsd. One of the stats simply sends a stat increment to statsd every time a message is received by the service. I need to display a graph that shows the the relative traffic over time for this stat. Generally speaking, I should be able to display a graph that refreshes every, say 10 seconds, and displays how many messages were recived in those 10 seconds as well as the history for a given period of time. However, no matter how I format my API query I cannot seem to get accurate data. I've read a number of articles including this one:
http://code.hootsuite.com/accurate-counting-with-graphite-and-statsd/
That seems to give some good insight but is still not quite giving me what I need. this is the closes I have come:
integral(hitcount(stats.recieved, "10seconds"))
However, I don't like the cumulative result of this and when I run this I get statistics that come nowhere near to what I see n my logs for messages received. I am ok with accepting some packet loss but we talking about orders of magnitude. I know I am doing something wrong. Just hoping someone can give me some insight as to what.

A couple of things to check/try:
Configure Graphite for Statsd
Check to make sure that you've used the retention schema and aggregation settings in Graphite that match how Statsd will be sending data (i.e. it sends one data point per 10 second flush interval).
Run a single Statsd aggregator
Be sure you are only running one instance of Statsd as running multiple statsd daemons will cause metrics to be dropped (as Graphite will be configured to only store one data point for it's highest precision of 10s:6h)
Limit the time range in the UI or URL API to less than 6 hours
When displaying graphs with data that crosses over the 6 hour threshold (e.g. from now to 7 hours ago), you will begin seeing 1 minute worth of aggregated count data for the displayed graph (if you've configured Graphite for statsd with retentions = 10s:6h,1min:7d,10min:5y). Rollups will occur based on the oldest data point in the time range (e.g. now till 7+ days = you'll get 10 min rollups).
If sending sparse or "bursty" data AND displaying old time range (triggering aggregation)
Confirm that your xFilesFactor is low enough that aggregation produces non null values even with a high rate of nulls. For example, 100 requests in the first 10 seconds, and none for the remaining 50 seconds in a minute would cause a storage of 100, null, null, null, null, null which would be summed up to null when the data ages if the XFilesFactor is higher than 1/6. Using the statsd recommended graphite configuration handles this, but it is good to know about... as this can give the appearance of lost data.
Saving schema or aggregation changes
If you changed the graphite schema or aggregation settings after any metrics were stored (in whisper = graphite's storage) you'll need to either delete the .wsp files for the metric (graphite will recreate them) or run whisper-resize.py.
Validating settings
You can verify the settings against some whisper data by running whisper-info.py on a .wsp file. Find the .wsp file for one of your metrics in /graphite/storage/whisper/
Run: whisper-info.py my_metric_data.wsp. whisper-info.py output should tell you more about how the storage settings are working.
TLDR;
You should ensure that Graphite is set to store one data point per 10 second interval for metrics coming from StatsD. You should make sure that Graphite is summing (not averaging) for count data coming from Statsd. Both of these can be handled by using the recommended Statsd configuration settings. Don't run more than one Statsd aggregator. When using the UI, limit the data returned to less than 6 hours OR understand what rollup you are viewing when looking at data that crosses retention thresholds. Lastly, make sure the settings take (if you've already been sending metrics).

Related

Resolve stackdriver incident when no more timeseries with available data violate the policy

I have stackdriver alerts/incidents on metrics like cloud run revision request latencies.
If there were a few calls a long time ago that had high latency, but there have not been any new requests since then which had a low latency, the incident will be permanently firing. This is because when there are no new requests coming in, there are no data points for the metric.
Is there a way to automatically stop an incident from firing when there are no recent data points for the underlying metrics? Or is there an alternative way to have alerts on high request latencies in cloud run that automatically switches off the alarm again when no new requests are coming that have a high latency?
The solution of https://stackoverflow.com/a/63997540/6473907 does not work as-is, because the google cloud run built-in metric for the request count does not go to zero when there are no more requests coming in. Instead, it just stops providing any data points. The solution for us was to create a custom logs-based metric that counts the log entries written for every request by cloud run, because the logs-based metric does indeed go to zero, then combine it with the AND_WITH_MATCHING_RESOURCE as described in https://stackoverflow.com/a/63997540/6473907
The chart compares the request count as obtained from the google pre-defined metric run.googleapis.com/request_count (in violet) with the metric generated by a custom logs-based metric (in blue). Only the latter goes to zero when no more requests are coming in.
Edit: This solution will not work because the request count stops being sent to Stackdriver instead of dropping to zero. As explained in the other (more correct) answer, the solution is to create a logs-based metric for the requests, and this will properly drop to zero when there are no additional requests.
This behaviour is documented in the alerting docs:
If measurements are missing (for example, if there are no HTTP
requests for a couple of minutes), the policy uses the last recorded
value to evaluate conditions.
There are a few recommendations in there to mitigate this issue, but all the suggestions assume you're actually collecting metrics, not your situation where there are no metrics at all (because you stopped receiving requests).
This is probably by design: even if you are not receiving additional requests, you might still want to check why all the latest requests had this increased latency.
To work around this feature, you could try to use multiple conditions in your alert policy:
One condition related to the latency: if latency > X
One condition related to the existence of requests: if request count > 1
If you combine those with AND_WITH_MATCHING_RESOURCE, it should only trigger if there's high latency and there are requests. The incident should be resolved when one of the 2 conditions are not met. Even if no new metrics are ingested related to the latency (so the alerting policy still thinks the latency is high), the request count will stop matching after the duration period specified.

Graphite Not Showing Recent Data

I have Graphite running on a Docker container and I've fed 24 hours worth of data sampled at 20 minute intervals to nine metrics – far from being a large payload. If I graph each metric in the Graphite web app, the last six hours of data are invisible. If I pull the raw data from the render API, these data points are indeed null (timestamps with no value).
However, if I narrow the time range down to the last six hours, the graphs display all the data I would expect. Weirder still, if I try to view this data using Grafana, the same thing happens: the last six hours are not shown unless I shrink the time range.
Is there any way to fix this so that recent data points are visible while viewing more than 6 hours of data?
I would start by looking at the storage-schemas.conf and storage-aggregation.conf files.
Do you have a different retention after the 6 hour?
We had a similar issue with data disappearing after the first 24h where we had high resolution. We had to tune how data is aggregated to the "next level".
Or maybe it is just the data is not yet written to disk - and only exists in the carbon-cache at the moment.

Google Analytics Add-on limitaions

I would like to get some data from GA via spreadsheet add-on as I did a few weeks ago (I gathered ~200 000 rows). I am using same metrics, dimensions and rest of the settings but I am still getting this error :
https://i.stack.imgur.com/hTpIg.png
I found that I will get some data when I do not set up "max-results", but the default is set up on 1000 which is not enough for my needs. Why?
What I have tried to solve this problem and it doesn’t work:
change GA views
change dimensions and metrics
change time range
create new spreadsheet
set up sharing settings of spreadsheet to "public on web"
I found the link regarding limits and quotas on API (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/config/mgmt/v3/limits-quotas#) and I should pass only through 50 000 requests per project, which I actually exceed on the first run, so another question how is it even possible to get more data than I suppose to get?
Should I really order more request or does "request" mean anything else than "one row"? Second why or what?
There is no any interpretation for the error.
Perhaps I am missing something, appreciate your help.
In short: while one could only guess what causes your problem it's most certainly not the API limit. Rows and requests are not at all the same, every request may fetch up to 10,000 rows.
"Request" is a call to the API, which might include one or many rows of data (unless your script somehow only requests one row at a time, which would be unusual).
If you exceeded your API quota the error message would say pretty much that.
The default is 1000 rows because that's a sensible default (compromise between convenience and performance). The API will return max 10,000 rows per request. To fetch 200 000 results the Add-on would have to do 20 requests, not 50 000.
Also a Google spreadsheet support 2mio cells at max, this might be exceeded by your result set.
"Service error" is a very unspecific error message which can be caused by a variety of causes from out-of-bound ranges to script timeouts or network latency. Sometimes the spreadsheet service dumps an additional error message in the browser console, so you should check your developer tools.

Is there a call limit to accessing LinkedIn share counts?

When using https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?format=json&url= to access an article's sharecount, is there an api daily limit?
We noticed that the time it was taking to retrieve count data was taking as much as 20 seconds on our production server. We added logic to cache the number of counts, and the 20 second delay stopped the next day. We are left wondering though what the limit might be (we can't seem to find it in your documentation).

Best retention practice using Graphite

I have been a happy user of Graphite+Grafana for a few months now and I have been advocating it around my firm.
My approach has been to measure data of interest and collect them into 1-minute or 5-minute buckets and send that information to Graphite. I was recently contacted by a group that processes quotes (billions a day!) and their approach has been to create a log line each time their applications process 1 million quotes. The problem is that the interval between 2 log lines can be highly erratic from 1 second to a few hours.
The dilemma is then: should I set my retention policy to a 1-second bucket so that I can see all measurements associated with spikes or should I use say a 1-minute bucket so that the number of data points to be saved and later on queried is much more manageable. FYI, when I set it to 1-second, showing the data for 8 or 10 charts, for a few days was bringing the system (or at least my browser) to a crawl because of the numbers of data points (mostly NULL) being pushed around from Graphite to Grafana
Here's my retention policy: 1s:10d,1m:36d,5m:180d
Alternatively, is there a way to configure Grafana+Graphite to only retrieve non-NULL data points?
What do you recommend?
You can always specify a lower retention period for 1s metrics so when you show a longer range Graphite will send you only the more coarse level.
For example, you can specify: 1s:2d, 1m:7d, 5m:180d
This way, if you show a range more than 2 days in the past you will get 1m resolution (and so on), which won't make your browser crawl, while you will still be able to inspect spikes in the last 2 days.

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