Mater

Overview

Mater (short for maître d') provides a translation service (and rudimentary API) between the Status Board JSON format for Graphs, and the Graphite API.

Usage

Changing the URL

Take the Graphite URL that you want to view on Status Board and replace its Graphite scheme/host/port (e.g. https://graphite.example.com:8000) with your Mater URL counterparts (e.g. http://mater.example.com:80). Mater will proxy the requested URI to Graphite and reformat the response for the Status Board client.

API Overview

Each Graphite JSON object (comprised of a target and datapoints) response is treated as a Status Board datasequence. It will use the target name for the datasequence title, so you'll typically want to apply a Graphite alias for something user-friendly. Set your Graphite title param and it will bubble up to your Status Board graph title. Specify a custom refresh rate by setting the refresh parameter in the URL.

Sample URI:

/render/?from=-1mins&target=aliasByNode(collectd.graphite-example-com.*.cpu-user.value,2)&title=User%20CPU&format=json&refresh=30

Sample Response:

{
  "graph" : {
    "title" : "User CPU",
    "refreshEveryNSeconds" : 30,
    "datasequences" : [
      {
        "title" : "cpu-0",
        "datapoints" : [
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 0 },
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 0 },
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 1 },
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 0 },
          { "title" : "02:38", "value" : 0 },
        ]
      },
      {
        "title" : "cpu-1",
        "datapoints" : [
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 0 },
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 0 },
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 0 },
          { "title" : "02:37", "value" : 0 },
          { "title" : "02:38", "value" : 0 },
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Deployment

The only required environment variable is GRAPHITE_URL. This should be set to the base URL of your Graphite composer (e.g. https://graphite.example.com). If your server requires Basic Auth, add these to your GRAPHITE_URL (e.g. https://user:[email protected]).

Mater supports optional Basic Authentication through Rack::Auth::Basic. Simply set MATER_AUTH to your colon-delimited credentials (e.g. user:test).

Local

$ bundle install
$ export GRAPHITE_URL=...
$ export MATER_AUTH=... (optional)
$ foreman start

Heroku

$ export DEPLOY=production/staging/you
$ heroku create -r $DEPLOY mater-$DEPLOY
$ heroku config:set -r $DEPLOY GRAPHITE_URL=...
$ heroku config:set -r $DEPLOY MATER_AUTH=... (optional)
$ git push $DEPLOY master

Caveats

Status Board is still fairly dumb in its ability to process data. For example, it won't accept float values so we have to convert our data to whole numbers. As I uncover other oddities they will be mentioned here.

License

Mater is distributed under the MIT license.