Docker - Spinning Up A Graphite Container

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As I am working through some testing methodologies for Infrastructure/app testing I wanted to throw together a usable Graphite image that I could easily spin up in order to capture metrics during testing. So I am throwing this together to show how you can also spin up a usable Graphite container.

The assumption here is that you already know how to use Graphite as well as configure devices to send StatsD/CollectD/Graphite metrics. So with that being said let’s spin up our Graphite container:

docker run -d --name graphite -p 80:80 -p 2003:2003 -p 2003:2003/udp \
-p 2004:2004 -p 7002:7002 mrlesmithjr/graphite

And once that spins up let’s make sure that our container is running:

docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                  COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                                                                                                           NAMES
4a27f74fbd19        mrlesmithjr/graphite   "/docker-entrypoint.s"   4 seconds ago       Up 2 seconds        0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:2003-2004->2003-2004/tcp, 0.0.0.0:7002->7002/tcp, 443/tcp, 0.0.0.0:2003->2003/udp   graphite

As you can see we have our usable Graphite container running. And we can now connect to the WebUI.

screen-shot-2016-09-22-at-11-59-35-pm

If we spun up our container as above once we destroy that container the Graphite data will be gone as well. So let’s spin up our container with persistent storage in order to retain our metrics data. But first we need to stop our existing container:

docker stop graphite

mkdir ~/docker-containers/graphite
cd ~/docker-containers/graphite
docker rm graphite
docker run -d --name graphite -p 80:80 -p 2003:2003 -p 2003:2003/udp \
-p 2004:2004 -p 7002:7002 -v $PWD/.data:/var/lib/graphite/whisper \
mrlesmithjr/graphite

And to validate that our persistent volume exists we can do the following:

ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   3 larrysmithjr  staff  102 Sep 23 00:10 .
drwxr-xr-x  18 larrysmithjr  staff  612 Sep 22 23:59 ..
drwxr-xr-x   3 larrysmithjr  staff  102 Sep 23 00:11 .data

As you can see our .data folder exists which is mounted inside our container at /var/lib/graphite/whisper and if we had data already coming into our Graphite container we would see that by:

ls -la .data
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  4 larrysmithjr  staff  136 Sep 23 00:11 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 larrysmithjr  staff  102 Sep 23 00:10 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 larrysmithjr  staff  102 Sep 23 00:11 carbon
drwxr-xr-x  3 larrysmithjr  staff  102 Sep 23 00:11 pdns

And if you pulled up the webUI again you should see data flowing in…

screen-shot-2016-09-23-at-12-16-35-am

So there you have it. You know have a usable Graphite Docker container ready for receiving metrics from devices that you have configured.

Enjoy!

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