Festive Graphite Line Art for the Masses

You have an installation of Graphite, a desire to learn more Ruby, and some festive spirit – what emerges?

An xmas tree drawn using proper metrics via the Ruby graphite gem, of course!

The magic happens with the Graphite::Logger class, because we can log metrics at specific points in time:

logger.log(when,{"Branches1" => 3})

I calculated the points to plot on paper, and found decent Graphite rendering settings by experimentation:

The code is on Github here: https://github.com/matthewskelton/GraphiteGreetings – fork away!

	require 'Graphite'
	require 'Logger'

	# Change these as needed for your environment
	server = "my.graphite.server.url"
	log = Logger.new(STDOUT)
	prefix = "Test.Me.XmasTree."

	# Create the logger to send stats to Graphite with specific timings
	logger = Graphite::Logger.new(server,log)

	# Define the offsets
	#
	# Use Now as a starting point,
	# or set a specific time e.g. Time.utc(2012,12,22,19,10,30)
	# We need a 20-minute window to plot
	t = Time.now
	t0 = Time.at(t.to_i - (20 * 60)) # 20 mins ago
	t1 = Time.at(t0.to_i + (60 * 1)) # Left base of tree
	t2 = Time.at(t0.to_i + (60 * 3)) # Lower tinsel2
	# etc.

	# Inject the stats - the order is determined by the default Graphite colours
	logger.log(t21,{prefix + "Tinsel1" => 3})
	logger.log(t18,{prefix + "Tinsel1" => 6})
	# etc.

view raw gistfile1.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I’d love to hear or see any suggestions for improvements to the script. Candles? Snowflakes? Reindeer?! Also, as my Ruby-fu is limited, if there are better ways of interacting with Graphite, I’d love the hear about them (I tried and failed to get activesupport to work on my machine, for example).