Today we are announcing the release of our Grafana datasource plugin. There’s now a valid cloud storage alternative to running your own time series database in house.
There are a few reasons why you might want to use Outlyer as your backend data store.
- Maintaining a time-series database that scales is quite hard
- You can setup alerts that notify by email, Pagerduty or drop a message into Slack
- Aggregate your StatsD metrics alongside your Nagios plugin performance data
- Use the same data on the Outlyer dashboards that were designed for TV screens
- Tightly control how your data is stored and accessed using our account model
- Write automation against a single API or using our command line utility
It’s pretty quick to get started if you already have a StatsD server setup. To send us your metrics simply install a Outlyer agent on your server and set the following config.
{
graphitePort: 2003,
graphiteHost: "graphite.outlyer.com",
port: 8125,
graphite: { legacyNamespace: false, globalPrefix: "<<AGENT_FINGERPINT>>" },
backends: [ "./backends/graphite" ]
}
This tells the StatsD server to send metrics into our graphite.outlyer.com endpoint prefixed by your agent fingerprint so we know where to store them.
You can find more docs on different StatsD options here:
https://support.outlyer.com/hc/en-gb/sections/201017119-Graphite-and-StatsD
Then you just need to add the Outlyer Grafana plugin to your Grafana instance. You can find instructions for hooking that up here:
https://support.outlyer.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208388113-Grafana
That’s pretty much it. Change your StatsD config to send data to us and add a data source in Grafana to display the data. We’ll take care of scaling the reads, writes and storing the data safely so your developers always get fast dashboards.