Carbon is one of the components of Graphite, and is responsible for receiving metrics over the network and writing them down to disk using a storage backend. Currently Whisper is our stable, supported backend and Ceres is the work-in-progress future replacement for Whisper.

Client applications can connect to the running carbon-cache.py daemon on port 2003 (default) and send it lines of text of the following format:

my.metric.name value unix_timestamp

For example:

performance.servers.www01.cpuUsage 42.5 1208815315

• The metric name is like a filesystem path that uses a dot as a separator instead of a forward-slash.

• The value is some scalar integer or floating point value

• The unix_timestamp is unix epoch time, as an integer.

Each line like this corresponds to one data point for one metric.

Alternatively, they can send pickle-formatted messages to port 2004 (default) which is considered faster than the line-based format.

Once you've got some clients sending data to carbon-cache, you can view graphs of that data through the frontend Graphite Web application.

First you must tell carbon-cache what user it should run as. This must be a user with write privileges to $GRAPHITE_ROOT/storage/whisper. Specify the user account in $GRAPHITE_ROOT/conf/carbon.conf. This user must also have write privileges to $GRAPHITE_ROOT/storage/log/carbon-cache

Alternatively, you can run carbon-cache/carbon-relay/carbon-aggregator as Twistd plugins, for example:

Usage: twistd [options] carbon-cache [options]
Options:
      --debug       Run in debug mode.
  -c, --config=     Use the given config file.
      --instance=   Manage a specific carbon instance. [default: a]
      --logdir=     Write logs to the given directory.
      --whitelist=  List of metric patterns to allow.
      --blacklist=  List of metric patterns to disallow.
      --version     Display Twisted version and exit.
      --help        Display this help and exit.

Common options to twistd(1), like --pidfile, --logfile, --uid, --gid, --syslog and --prefix are fully supported and have precedence over carbon-*'s own options. Please refer to twistd --help for the full list of supported twistd options.

First you obviously need to decide what data it is you want to graph with graphite. The script examples/example-client.py demonstrates a simple client that sends loadavg data for your local machine to carbon on a minutely basis.

The default storage schema stores data in one-minute intervals for 2 hours. This is probably not what you want so you should create a custom storage schema according to the docs on the Graphite wiki.