Half a Mind

Artsy depends on statsd and graphite every day. When our graphite server failed recently, I took the opportunity to revisit an old post about the simplest possible steps for setting up your own statsd and graphite server.

It turns out, the tools have improved quite a bit since then. This post provided an outline in which you only need a Berksfile (to specify cookbooks) and a Vagrantfile (to drive the provisioning). Its settings and cookbooks were slightly out of date, so I made some modifications.

In Berksfile:

source "https://supermarket.getchef.com"

cookbook 'apt'
cookbook 'statsd', git: 'https://github.com/librato/statsd-cookbook.git'
cookbook 'graphite', git: 'https://github.com/hectcastro/chef-graphite.git'

In Vagrantfile:

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.omnibus.chef_version = :latest
  config.vm.box = "dummy"
  config.vm.box_url = "https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box"
  
  # Provider
  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
    aws.access_key_id = '...YOUR AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID...'
    aws.secret_access_key = '...YOUR AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY...'
    aws.keypair_name = 'your_keypair_name'
    aws.ami = "ami-d017b2b8" # Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS us-east ebs-backed 64-bit (chef?)
    aws.region = "us-east-1"
    aws.instance_type = "m3.large"
    aws.security_groups = ["default", "statsd_graphite"]
    override.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "/path/to/your/keypair.pem"
    aws.tags = {
      'Name' => 'Statsd (Vagrant Provision)'
    }

    # Mount a 50 GB root partition rather than run out of space on the default
    aws.block_device_mapping = [
      {
        'DeviceName' => "/dev/sda1",
        'VirtualName' => "root",
        'Ebs.VolumeSize' => '50'
      }
    ]
  end

  # Provisioning
  config.berkshelf.enabled = true
  config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|

    chef.add_recipe "apt"
    chef.add_recipe "statsd"
    chef.add_recipe "graphite"

    # We override the graphite cookbook's default storage_aggregation and storage_schemas settings according to Etsy's recommendations at https://github.com/etsy/statsd/blob/master/docs/graphite.md
    chef.json = {
      statsd: {
        legacyNamespace: false  # adopt new, preferred namespace scheme (all statsd metrics managed under "stats")
      },
      graphite: {
        storage_aggregation: [
          {
            min: {
              pattern: "\\.lower$",
              xFilesFactor: "0.1",
              aggregationMethod: "min"
            }
          },
          {
            max: {
              pattern: "\\.upper(_\\d+)?$",
              xFilesFactor: "0.1",
              aggregationMethod: "max"
            }
          },
          {
            sum: {
              pattern: "\\.sum$",
              xFilesFactor: "0",
              aggregationMethod: "sum"
            }
          },
          {
            count: {
              pattern: "\\.count$",
              xFilesFactor: "0",
              aggregationMethod: "sum"
            }
          },
          {
            count_legacy: {
              pattern: "^stats_counts.*",
              xFilesFactor: "0",
              aggregationMethod: "sum"
            }
          },
          {
            default_average: {
              pattern: ".*",
              xFilesFactor: "0.3",
              aggregationMethod: "average"
            }
          }
        ],
        storage_schemas: [
          {
            stats: {
              priority: "100",
              pattern: "^stats.*",
              retentions: "10s:6h,1min:6d,10min:1800d"
            }
          },
          {
            catchall: {
              priority: "0",
              pattern: ".*",
              retentions: "60s:5y"
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  end
end

What you’ll need to do:

1. Download and install Vagrant
2. Download and install ChefDK
3. Create an AWS keypair
4. Create a statsd_graphite AWS security group that allows SSH and HTTP access, as well as UDP access to port 8125 (for statsd)
5. Update the access_key_id, secret_access_key, keypair_name, and private_key_path values in the Berksfile

Then, run the following commands:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf vagrant-omnibus vagrant-aws
vagrant up --provider aws

That’s it!