grinder_to_graphite 0.0.5

Overview

Grinder to Graphite (g2g) is a tool that analyzes the logs from your Grinder tests, and sends the data into Graphite where it can be visualized in a variety of ways.

Realtime test data may be sent to Graphite while your Grinder run is in progress, or it may be sent to Graphite after your test is completed.

Once the data is in Graphite you have a great amount of flexibility in the types of reports and visualizations you want to generate.

Who should use g2g?

g2g is a good match for you if any of the following are true:

• You have access to a Graphite setup already, or you don’t mind installing it.

• You sometimes do long-duration Grinder runs and you don’t want to wait for the run to complete before you can see charts of the incoming data.

• You want to integrate data from The Grinder with data from a variety of other sources. (OS metrics like CPU use, application metrics like DB lookups per second, etc.)

Who should use Grinder Analyzer instead of g2g?

If you just want to get some fast, simple graphs from your Grinder run, without a lot of setup hassle, Grinder Analyzer is probably a better bet for you than g2g. See:

http://track.sourceforge.net

Installation

g2g is written in Python. The best way to install g2g is via pip.

pip install grinder_to_graphite

While it is certainly possible to install grinder_to_graphite into your core Python environment, we recommend installing it into a virtual environment with virtualenv.

Once pip has installed g2g, you will need to generate a config file, and edit it to be suitable for your own environment. g2g comes with a command-line option to generate a sample config file

g2g -e

This will generate a file named ‘g2g.sample.conf’ which you can use as the basis for creating your own configuration.

There must be a running installation of Graphite on your network for g2g to forward data to. See the Graphite web site for details on setting up and configuring Graphite

http://graphite.wikidot.com/

Usage

The executable that comes with with Grinder to Graphite is g2g. The normal usage, (after adjusting the values in your sample config file to be appropriate for your environment) looks like this:

g2g  <config_file>

To see a full list of all your g2g options:

g2g --help

For realtime (tailing) mode to work, you will first need to do a quick run with your grinder script to generate a valid mapping file. A mapping file is a grinder log file that most likely has a name like <hostname>-0.log. The final lines of this file contain a summary table of the performance data. Once a valid mapping file is in place, you can do realtime reporting for your Grinder script as many times as you want.

Additional Resources

Java/JMX counters and application-level metrics can be fed to Graphite using the JMXTrans tool:

http://code.google.com/p/jmxtrans/

OS-level metrics (CPU, mem, etc.) can be fed to Graphite via quickstatd or collectd (with graphite plugin)

https://bitbucket.org/travis_bear/quickstatd