flask-rrd

The flask-rrd project is a simple Flask web application that acts as an API to create, update and graph RRD databases using rrdtool.

development

The following is helpful for setting up a local development environment or getting started with a sample RRD. For actual deployment, see the deployment section.

dependencies

Several native dependencies need to be installed so that the Python rrdtool module can be compiled. Install them using your system's package manager.

For yum-based systems:

1. python-dev
2. librrd-dev
3. libxml2-dev
4. libglib2.0-dev
5. libcairo2-dev
6. libpango1.0-dev

For apt-get-based systems:

1. python-dev
2. librrd-dev
3. libxml2-dev
4. libglib2.0-dev
5. libcairo2-dev
6. libpango1.0-dev

Once you have the native dependencies installed, install the required Python dependencies into a virtualenv using pip. If you find flask-rrd works with newer versions of these pinned libraries, I would appreciate a PR to update the libraries.

pip install -r requirements.txt

docker

Alternatively, if local development isn't your think, you can build and deploy inside of a Docker container. Build a Docker image by running the following command.

docker build --tag flask-rrd:latest .

You can also then deploy the application in a Docker container like so.

docker run -p 5000:500 flask-rrd:latest

samples

Included in flask-rrd's manage.py script are a few commands to help create a test RRD, update the test RRD, and lastly, graph the test RRD. All of the manage.py commands depend on the flask-rrd web application being up and healthy.

Start the web application.

manage.py runserver

Update the RRD. Note, this also creates the RRD the first time you run it. This loops indefinitely (until you press CTRL+C) and will update the RRD database every second.

manage.py update_rrd

Graph the RRD.

manage.py graph_rrd

Alternatively, you can navigate to http://localhost:5000/graph/test to see the RRD graph itself instead of the response code.

deployment

The RRD collectors provided in the bin directory depend on CRONd to invoke them every minute. I'm not a huge fan of this, but this is easier for now.

VENV=/path/to/venv
FLASK_RRD_GIT=/path/to/flask-rrd/
* * * * * $VENV/bin/python $FLASK_RRD_GIT/bin/meminfo-to-rrd
* * * * * $VENV/bin/python $FLASK_RRD_GIT/bin/stat-to-rrd
* * * * * $VENV/bin/python $FLASK_RRD_GIT/bin/netdev-to-rrd eth0
* * * * * $VENV/bin/python $FLASK_RRD_GIT/bin/df-to-rrd