Visage
Visage is a web interface for viewing collectd statistics.
It also provides a JSON interface onto collectd
's RRD data,
giving you an easy way to mash up the data.
Features
- Renders graphs in the browser with SVG, and retrieves data asynchronously
- Easy interface for building, ordering, and sharing collections of graphs
- Interactive graph elements - toggle line visibility, inspect exact point-in-time data
- Drop-down or mouse selection of timeframes
- JSON interface onto collectd RRDs
- Support for FLUSH using either collectd's rrdtool plugin, or rrdcached
Here, have a graph:
Installing
N.B: Visage must be deployed on a machine where collectd
stores its stats in RRD.
Ubuntu
On Ubuntu, to install dependencies run:
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential librrd-ruby ruby ruby-dev rubygems collectd
Then install the app with:
gem install visage-app
CentOS/RHEL
CentOS/RHEL 5
Visage uses yajl-ruby to work with JSON, which requires Ruby >= 1.8.6. CentOS/RHEL 5 ship with Ruby 1.8.5, so you will need to use Ruby Enterprise Edition.
Endpoint provide packages for REE and a Yum repository to ease installation.
Follow the above instructions for installing REE, and then run:
sudo yum install -y librrd-dev ruby rubygems collectd
gem install librrd
Then install the app with:
gem install visage-app
CentOS/RHEL 6+
On CentOS 6, to install dependencies run:
sudo yum install -y ruby-RRDtool ruby ruby-devel rubygems collectd
Then install the app with:
gem install visage-app
openSUSE 12.3+
On openSUSE 12.3+, to install dependencies run:
sudo zypper install -y ruby-rrdtool ruby ruby-devel collectd
Then install the app with:
gem install visage-app
Before running visage-app set the environment variable to "RRDDIR=/var/lib/collectd"
Mac OS X
Visage is not supported on Mac OS X, as RRDtool is a pain in the arse on that platform. It's highly recommended you use Vagrant to fire up an Ubuntu box to run Visage.
Running
You can try out Visage quickly with:
visage-app start
Then paste the URL from the output into your browser.
If you get a command not found
when running the above command (RubyGems likely
isn't on your PATH), try this instead:
$(dirname $(dirname $(gem which visage-app)))/bin/visage-app start
Deploying
Visage can be deployed easily on Apache with Passenger:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger
Visage can attempt to generate an Apache vhost config for use with Passenger:
$ visage-app genapache
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName ubuntu.localdomain
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /home/user/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/visage-app-0.1.0/lib/visage-app/public
<Directory "/home/user/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/visage-app-0.1.0/lib/visage-app/public">
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Copypasta this into your system's Apache config structure and tune to taste.
To do this on Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo -s
visage-app genapache > /etc/apache2/sites-available/visage
a2ensite visage
a2dissite default
service apache2 reload
Then visit your Apache instance in a browser, and Visage will be up and running.
Configuring
Visage looks for some environment variables when starting up:
CONFIG_PATH
, an entry on the configuration file search path.RRDDIR
, the location of collectd's RRDs.COLLECTDSOCK
, the location of collectd's Unix socket.RRDCACHEDSOCK
, the location of rrdcached's Unix socket.VISAGE_DATA_BACKEND
, which storage backend to retrieve data from.
Visage has a configuration search path which can be used for overriding
individual files. By default it has one entry: $VISAGE_ROOT/lib/visage/config/
.
You can set the CONFIG_PATH
environment variable to add another directory to
the config load path. This directory will be searched when loading up
configuration files:
CONFIG_PATH=/var/lib/visage visage-app start
This is especially useful when you want to deploy + run Visage from an installed gem with Passenger. e.g.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName monitoring.example.org
ServerAdmin [email protected]
SetEnv CONFIG_PATH /var/lib/visage
SetEnv RRDDIR /opt/collectd/var/lib/collectd
DocumentRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/visage-app-0.3.0/lib/visage/public
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log common
</VirtualHost>
Also to keep in mind when deploying with Passenger, the CONFIG_PATH
directory
and its files need to have the correct ownership:
chown nobody:nogroup -R /var/lib/visage
Developing + testing
Check out the code:
git clone git://github.com/auxesis/visage.git
Install the development dependencies:
bundle
Run all the cukes:
rake
Visage tests should pass every time. Travis says the current Visage is .
Run the app with:
VISAGE_DATA_BACKEND=Mock bundle exec shotgun lib/visage-app/config.ru -p 9292 -o 0.0.0.0 --server thin
Visage ships a Mock data backend, so you can test without needing a real instance of collectd writing data with the RRDtool plugin. Per the above example, you can enable it by specifying the VISAGE_DATA_BACKEND=Mock
environment variable on the command line.
To create and install a new gem from the current source tree:
rake build
Releasing
- Bump the version in
lib/visage-app/version.rb
- Add an entry to
CHANGELOG.md
git commit
everything.- Build the gem with
rake build
- Push the gem to RubyGems.org with
rake push
Licencing
Visage is MIT licensed.
Visage is distributed with Highcharts. Torstein Hønsi has kindly granted permission to distribute Highcharts under the GPLv2 as part of Visage.
If you ever need an excellent JavaScript charting library, please consider purchasing a commercial license for Highcharts.
Support
- Post to the mailing list.
- Ping @auxesis on Twitter.
- Check issues on GitHub.