Tasseo

Reading the tea leaves.

Overview

Tasseo is a lightweight, easily configurable, near-realtime dashboard for Graphite events. Charts are refreshed every two seconds and provide a heads-up view of the most current value.

The default behavior is designed for a Carbon retention policy with a 1-second resolution for at least 5 minutes, although this can be modified within the dashboard and metric attributes.

Configuration

Examples

Creating your own dashboard is as simple as dropping a JSON file into the public/d directory, committing it, and pushing the code to a Heroku app. The name of your file (minus the .js suffix) becomes the name of your dashboard. Here's an example configuration that you could put in e.g. public/d/example.js:

var metrics =
[
  {
    "alias": "pulse-events-per-second",
    "target": "pulse.pulse-events-per-second",
    "warning": 100,
    "critical": 500
  }
];

The target attribute is the only mandatory field. As you might expect, each dashboard can contain an arbitrary list of different Graphite metrics. Another perfectly valid example:

var metrics =
[
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-econns-apps-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-econns-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-elevated-route-lookups-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-errors-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-h10-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-h11-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-h12-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-h13-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-h14-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-h18-per-minute" },
  { "target": "pulse.hermes-h99-per-minute" }
];

As an alternative to static dashboard layouts, it's possible to use a false target to pad cells on the dashboard grid. Because metrics are read in a predictable manner from their respective .js files, this provides a mechanism for organizing an otherwise uncontrollable layout.

var metrics =
[
  { "target": "foo" },
  { "target": false },
  { "target": "bar" }
];

Thresholds

warning and critical thresholds are optional. If defined, the color of the graph will change when the current value exceeds the respective threshold. If the thresholds are reversed (i.e. critical is lower than warning), Tasseo understands that an inverse threshold is expected.

Dashboard Attributes

• period - Range (in minutes) of data to query from Graphite. (optional, defaults to 5)
• refresh - Refresh interval for charts, in milliseconds. (optional, defaults to 2000)
• theme - Default theme for dashboard. Currently the only option is dark. (optional)
• toolbar - Dictates whether the toolbar is shown or not. (optional, defaults to true)
• padnulls - Determines whether to pad null values or not. (optional, defaults to true)

Metric Attributes

• alias - Short name for the metric. (optional)
• target - Full target name as used by Graphite. Can contain a combination of chained functions. (mandatory)
• description - Text description or comment. (optional)
• warning - Warning threshold. Exceeding this value causes the graph to turn yellow. (optional)
• critical - Critical threshold. Exceeding this value causes the graph to turn red. (optional)
• unit - Arbitrary string that can be used to designate a unit value; for example, "Mbps". (optional)

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.yourdomain.com). If your server requires Basic Auth, you can set the GRAPHITE_AUTH variable (e.g. username:password).

Development

$ rvm use 1.9.2
$ bundle install
$ export GRAPHITE_URL=...
$ export GRAPHITE_AUTH=... # e.g. username:password (optional)
$ foreman start
$ open http://127.0.0.1:5000

Production

$ export DEPLOY=production/staging/you
$ heroku create -r $DEPLOY -s cedar tasseo-$DEPLOY
$ heroku config:set -r $DEPLOY GRAPHITE_URL=...
$ heroku config:set -r $DEPLOY GRAPHITE_AUTH=...
$ git push $DEPLOY master
$ heroku scale -r $DEPLOY web=1
$ heroku open -r $DEPLOY

Graphite Server Configuration

In order to support CORS with JSON instead of JSONP, we need to allow specific headers and allow the cross-domain origin request. The following are suggested settings for Apache 2.x. Adjust as necessary for your environment or webserver.

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, OPTIONS"
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "origin, authorization, accept"

If your Graphite composer is proteced by basic authentication, you have to ensure that the HTTP verb OPTIONS is allowed unauthenticated. This looks like the following for Apache:

<Location />
    AuthName "graphs restricted"
    AuthType Basic
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd
    <LimitExcept OPTIONS>
      require valid-user
    </LimitExcept>
</Location>

See http://blog.rogeriopvl.com/archives/nginx-and-the-http-options-method/ for an Nginx example.

GitHub Authentication

To authenticate against a GitHub organization, set the following environment variables:

$ export GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=<id>
$ export GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=<secret>
$ export GITHUB_AUTH_ORGANIZATION=<org>

To register an OAuth application, go here: https://github.com/settings/applications

License

Tasseo is distributed under a 3-clause BSD license. Third-party software libraries included with this project are distributed under their respective licenses.

• d3.js - 3-clause BSD
• Rickshaw - MIT