Getting Started With Graphite and Graphite Derived Materials
In the chemical and materials science fields, the crystalline allotropes of carbon have been of intense interest for quite some time. Carbon black, graphene and related derivatives have garnered significant attention for their synthesis and manufacturing applications. Moreover, their unique properties have inspired a variety of novel functional materials with potential for a wide range of applications in areas such as chemistry, physics and material science.
Graphite is one of the primary metrics aggregators at Wikimedia Foundation and provides a powerful API for querying, transformation and aggregation. However, data is usually not submitted to Graphite directly; it is sent through Statsd. Statsd is a server that acts as an intermediary between Graphite and other client software such as Grafana.
Getting Started with Graphite
The best way to get familiar with Graphite is to read the documentation. It is comprehensive and well written.
For the more technically inclined, you can also try your hand at the examples. These are great for exploring the various functions and their parameters.
Graphite has several gotchas that you should be aware of before beginning production use. These include:
Metric Keys
Graphite does not do a very good job of specifying exactly what it will accept for metric keys. As a result, metric keys may contain characters that are not valid for Graphite: for example, slashes (which it interprets as separate dots) are converted to single dots and hyphens or underscores are often used instead. Moreover, if a metric key contains a null value, Graphite will assume that it should be replaced with the last known value. This can be confusing, especially if the metric is updated infrequently.
