Graphite Derivative

graphite derivative is a metric which represents a rate of change in the metric over time. This is an important feature because it allows us to compare a running total metric to a delta between data points over time.

Typically, the rate of change in statsd counters is stored as either the number of hits per flushInterval or per second. This is a problem because statsd is known to have difficulty flushing high rates of data to Graphite, and the derivative function is then more susceptible to a loss of data.

The Graphite functions facilitate almost every calculation, alias, exclusion, and grouping method that DevOps teams need in order to display metrics in a useful configuration. This is because Graphite is a scalable solution and supports various architectures.

A few gotchas to be aware of:

The first gotcha is a fairly common one. Metric keys contain a number of non-alphanumeric characters which can be confusing to Graphite. Generally, you can replace these with hyphens or underscores to make them more meaningful in the metric key.

Another gotcha is that hostnames and IP addresses often get confused by Graphite. Graphite will convert slashes to dots (adding additional complexity to your keys), will sometimes remove the prefix and postfix if you use whisper, and will even create an extra hierarchy with an empty node at the end of the metric key if you include the hostname or IP address in the metric key.

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