Overview

Graphite

Stacks383

Followers419

Votes42

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks1.3K

collectd

Stacks98

Followers156

Votes5

GitHub Stars3.3K

Forks1.3K

Graphite vs collectd: What are the differences?

# Key Differences between Graphite and Collectd

Graphite and collectd are both tools used for monitoring and graphing purposes, but they have some key differences that set them apart. Here are the main differences between Graphite and collectd:

1. **Data Storage**: Graphite stores data in a time-series database called Whisper, while collectd uses RRDtool for storing collected data points. Whisper allows for better scalability and flexibility in managing large amounts of data compared to RRDtool.

2. **Data Collection**: Graphite primarily focuses on graphing and visualization of data, while collectd is more focused on collecting system performance data. Collectd can gather a wide range of metrics from various sources, making it a versatile monitoring tool.

3. **Data Retention Policies**: Graphite allows for more customizable data retention policies, enabling users to define how long data should be stored. On the other hand, collectd has predefined data retention policies that might not be as flexible as those in Graphite.

4. **Architecture**: Graphite is made up of three components: Carbon for receiving data, Whisper for storing data, and Graphite web for visualization. Collectd, on the other hand, is a lightweight daemon that collects data and sends it to a central server for processing.

5. **Plugin Ecosystem**: Collectd has a vast plugin ecosystem that allows users to extend its functionality and monitor a wide range of systems and applications. Graphite, while extensible, might not have as extensive a plugin ecosystem as collectd.

6. **Usage**: Graphite is more commonly used for monitoring and graphing metrics related to server performance and application behavior. Collectd, on the other hand, is more geared towards system administrators and developers who need to collect and analyze system performance data in real-time.

In Summary, Graphite and collectd have distinct differences in terms of data storage, collection, retention policies, architecture, plugin ecosystem, and usage scenarios.

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Advice on Graphite, collectd

Leonardo Henrique da

Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket

Dec 8, 2020

Decided

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

402k views402k

Comments

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
Able to display automation test results,
System monitoring / Nginx API,
Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

869k views869k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Graphite	collectd
Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand	collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you're at the right place, too.
carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data;whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD);graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo	fast;simple;integrated;easy to operate
Statistics
GitHub Stars 6.0K	GitHub Stars 3.3K
GitHub Forks 1.3K	GitHub Forks 1.3K
Stacks 383	Stacks 98
Followers 419	Followers 156
Votes 42	Votes 5
Pros & Cons
Pros 16 Render any graph 9 Great functions to apply on timeseries 8 Well supported integrations 6 Includes event tracking 3 Rolling aggregation makes storage managable	Pros 2 Modular, plugins 2 Open Source 1 KISS
Integrations
Sensu Nagios Logstash Windows Server Netdata Riemann Diamond Telegraf Ganglia	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Graphite, collectd?

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).