A convenient Ruby wrapper for the Librato Metrics API.
This gem provides granular control for scripting interactions with the Metrics core API. It is well suited for integrations, scripts, workers & background jobs. If you want to submit from a web app, take at look at librato-rails and/or librato-rack.
In your shell:
gem install librato-metrics
Then, in your application or script:
require 'librato/metrics'
For best performance we recommend installing yajl-ruby:
gem install yajl-ruby
If you are using jruby, you need to ensure jruby-openssl is available:
gem install jruby-openssl
If you are looking for the quickest possible route to getting a data into Metrics, you only need two lines:
Librato::Metrics.authenticate 'email', 'api_key'
Librato::Metrics.submit :my_metric => 42, :my_other_metric => 1002
Unspecified metrics will send a gauge, but if you need to send a different metric type or include additional properties, simply use a hash:
Librato::Metrics.submit :my_metric => {:type => :counter, :value => 1002, :source => 'myapp'}
While this is all you need to get started, if you are sending a number of metrics regularly a queue may be easier/more performant so read on...
Make sure you have an account for Metrics and then authenticate with your email and API key (on your account page):
Librato::Metrics.authenticate 'email', 'api_key'
If you are sending very many measurements or sending them very often, it will be much higher performance to bundle them up together to reduce your request volume. Use Queue for this.
Queue up a simple gauge metric named temperature:
queue = Librato::Metrics::Queue.new
queue.add :temperature => 32.2
While symbols are used by convention for metric names, strings will work just as well:
queue.add 'myapp.request_time' => 86.7
If you are tracking measurements over several seconds/minutes, the queue will handle storing measurement time for you (otherwise all metrics will be recorded as measured when they are submitted).
If you want to specify a time other than queuing time for the measurement:
# use a epoch integer
queue.add :humidity => {:measure_time => 1336508422, :value => 48.2}
# use a Time object to correct for a 5 second delay
queue.add :humidity => {:measure_time => Time.now-5, :value => 37.6}
You can queue multiple metrics at once. Here's a gauge (load) and a counter (visits):
queue.add :load => 2.2, :visits => {:type => :counter, :value => 400}
Queue up a metric with a specified source:
queue.add :cpu => {:source => 'app1', :value => 92.6}
A complete list of metric attributes is available in the API documentation.
Send currently queued measurements to Metrics:
queue.submit
If you are measuring something very frequently e.g. per-request in a web application (order mS) you may not want to send each individual measurement, but rather periodically send a single aggregate measurement, spanning multiple seconds or even minutes. Use an Aggregator for this.
Aggregate a simple gauge metric named response_latency:
aggregator = Librato::Metrics::Aggregator.new
aggregator.add :response_latency => 85.0
aggregator.add :response_latency => 100.5
aggregator.add :response_latency => 150.2
aggregator.add :response_latency => 90.1
aggregator.add :response_latency => 92.0
Which would result in a gauge measurement like:
{:name => "response_latency", :count => 5, :sum => 517.8, :min => 85.0, :max => 150.2}
You can specify a source during aggregate construction:
aggregator = Librato::Metrics::Aggregator.new(:source => 'foobar')
You can aggregate multiple metrics at once:
aggregator.add :app_latency => 35.2, :db_latency => 120.7
Send the currently aggregated metrics to Metrics:
aggregator.submit
If you have operations in your application you want to record execution time for, both Queue and Aggregator support the #time method:
aggregator.time :my_measurement do
# do work...
end
The difference between the two is that Queue submits each timing measurement individually, while Aggregator submits a single timing measurement spanning all executions.
If you need extra attributes for a Queue timing measurement, simply add them on:
queue.time :my_measurement, :source => 'app1' do
# do work...
end
Annotation streams are a great way to track events like deploys, backups or anything else that might affect your system. They can be overlaid on any other metric stream so you can easily see the impact of changes.
At a minimum each annotation needs to be assigned to a stream and to have a title. Let's add an annotation for deploying v45 of our app to the deployments stream:
Librato::Metrics.annotate :deployments, 'deployed v45'
There are a number of optional fields which can make annotations even more powerful:
Librato::Metrics.annotate :deployments, 'deployed v46', :source => 'frontend',
:start_time => 1354662596, :end_time => 1354662608,
:description => 'Deployed 6f3bc6e67682: fix lotsa bugs…'
You can also automatically annotate the start and end time of an action by using annotate's block form:
Librato::Metrics.annotate :deployments, 'deployed v46' do
# do work..
end
More fine-grained control of annotations is available via the Annotator object:
annotator = Librato::Metrics::Annotator.new
# list annotation streams
streams = annotator.list
# fetch a list of events in the last hour from a stream
annotator.fetch :deployments, :start_time => (Time.now.to_i-3600)
# delete an event
annotator.delete_event 'deployments', 23
See the documentation of Annotator for more details and examples of use.
Both Queue and Aggregator support automatically submitting measurements on a given time interval:
# submit once per minute
timed_queue = Librato::Metrics::Queue.new(:autosubmit_interval => 60)
# submit every 5 minutes
timed_aggregator = Librato::Metrics::Aggregator.new(:autosubmit_interval => 300)
Queue also supports auto-submission based on measurement volume:
# submit when the 400th measurement is queued
volume_queue = Librato::Metrics::Queue.new(:autosubmit_count => 400)
These options can also be combined for more flexible behavior.
Both options are driven by the addition of measurements. If you are adding measurements irregularly (less than once per second), time-based submission may lag past your specified interval until the next measurement is added.
If your goal is to collect metrics every x seconds and submit them, check out this code example.
Get name and properties for all metrics you have in the system:
metrics = Librato::Metrics.metrics
Get only metrics whose name includes time:
metrics = Librato::Metrics.metrics :name => 'time'
Get attributes for metric temperature:
data = Librato::Metrics.get_metric :temperature
Get the 20 most recent data points for temperature:
data = Librato::Metrics.get_measurements :temperature, :count => 20
Get the 20 most recent data points for temperature from a specific source:
data = Librato::Metrics.get_measurements :temperature, :count => 20, :source => 'app1'
Get the 20 most recent 15 minute data point rollups for temperature:
data = Librato::Metrics.get_measurements :temperature, :count => 20, :resolution => 900
There are many more options supported for querying, take a look at the REST API docs or the get_metric/get_measurements documentation for more details.
Setting custom properties on your metrics is easy:
# assign a period and default color
Librato::Metrics.update_metric :temperature, :period => 15, :attributes => { :color => 'F00' }
It is also possible to update properties for multiple metrics at once, see the #update_metric method documentation for more information.
If you ever need to remove a metric and all of its measurements, doing so is easy:
# delete the metrics 'temperature' and 'humidity'
Librato::Metrics.delete_metrics :temperature, :humidity
You can also delete using wildcards:
# delete metrics that start with cpu. except for cpu.free
Librato::Metrics.delete_metrics :names => 'cpu.*', :exclude => ['cpu.free']
Note that deleted metrics and their measurements are unrecoverable, so use with care.
If you need to use metrics with multiple sets of authentication credentials simultaneously, you can do it with Client:
joe = Librato::Metrics::Client.new
joe.authenticate 'email1', 'api_key1'
mike = Librato::Metrics::Client.new
mike.authenticate 'email2', 'api_key2'
All of the same operations you can call directly from Librato::Metrics are available per-client:
# list Joe's metrics
joe.metrics
# fetch the last 20 data points for Mike's metric, humidity
mike.get_measurements :humidity, :count => 20
There are two ways to associate a new queue with a client:
# these are functionally equivalent
joe_queue = Librato::Metrics::Queue.new(:client => joe)
joe_queue = joe.new_queue
Once the queue is associated you can use it normally:
joe_queue.add :temperature => {:source => 'sf', :value => 65.2}
joe_queue.submit
The librato-metrics gem currently does not do internal locking for thread safety. When used in multi-threaded applications, please add your own mutexes for sensitive operations.
librato-metrics is sufficiently complex that not everything can be documented in the README. Additional options are documented regularly in the codebase. You are encouraged to take a quick look through the docs and source for more.
We also maintain a set of examples of common uses and appreciate contributions if you have them.
- Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet.
- Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it.
- Fork the project and submit a pull request from a feature or bugfix branch.
- Please review our code conventions.
- Please include specs. This is important so we don't break your changes unintentionally in a future version.
- Please don't modify the gemspec, Rakefile, version, or changelog. If you do change these files, please isolate a separate commit so we can cherry-pick around it.
Copyright (c) 2011-2014 Librato Inc. See LICENSE for details.