pingdom-to-graphite

A tool for copying metrics from Pingdom to graphite. Pingdom, although allowing access to effectively all your metrics through the API, does have some limits in place to prevent abuse. This tool tries to be mindful of that, although does provide a "backfill" option if you care to burn up your daily api limit in one fell swoop.

pingdom-to-graphite is available as a gem package:

% gem install pingdom-to-graphite
% pingdom-to-graphite

Or, you could grab the source and call the executable directly:

% git clone git://github.com/lewg/pingdom-to-graphite.git
% cd pingdom-to-graphite
% bundle install
% bin/pingdom-to-graphite

The utility itself will provide detailed help for all the commands if you just invoke it by itself:

% pingdom-to-graphite

Ok, so you don't like reading command line help. Here's how to get up and running quickly:

% pingdom-to-graphite init

Will place a sample config file into the default location ~/.p2g/config.json. Don't worry scripters, this location can be overriden with the -c switch. Drop your pingdom credentials and graphite settings into there to enable the script to do any actual work.

% pingdom-to-graphite init_checks [regex]

This will pre-fill the pingdom->checks setting in your config file with a list of all your available check ids. If you'd like to limit the list, you can supply an optional regular expression, and only the matching checks will be placed in your config. Since you're curious:

% pingdom-to-graphite list

Will list them all, as well as their current status. Ok, back to business:

% pingdom-to-graphite update

Will pull the 100 most recent checks for each check specified in your config file and create a ~/.p2g/state.json file storing a few key timestamps about what data you've successfully send to graphite. Similar to the config file, this location can be overridden with the -s switch.

% pingdom-to-graphite update

"Hey, that's the same command!" you say. Indeed it is, and will run through your checks picking up where we left of from the last update. If you stopped to check graphite after that last step you might even pick up a few new checks. The idea is just to scedule this job via cron and let your metrics roll in on a fixed schedule. How often? Well, you can't run any checks at more then a minute resolution, so going any more frequently then that is wasteful. The actual limiting factor is that updating each metric is a separate API call, so the more checks you want to pipe to graphite the less frequently you'll be able to run the script. Want some numbers?

% pingdom-to-graphite advice

Will give you the rough API numbers you'd consume a day given your number of monitored checks in five minute increments until it finds something that works. However, keep in mind that you're not using this to do alerting (right, I mean, that's what you're paying Pingdom for) and that graphite doesn't have any issues backfilling content, so picking the most aggressive value you can isn't necessarily the best approach! Speaking of the API, how about some more historical data because, you know, charts and stuff! Got that covered, but you're going to have to pick the specific check you'd like some more data for.

% pingdom-to-graphite backfill CHECK_ID

Will use up a number of your existing API calls to get historical data for that specific check. How many? Well, it will ask, and you can tell it. You can also specify with the -l flag.

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2012 Lewis J. Goettner, III

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.