I have spent a significant amount of time recently looking into monitoring and metrics collection. At work we have Nagios and Cacti currently and are looking at other options. After setting up Ganglia we decided to give Graphite a try. There is a script to send data from Ganglia to Graphite although the whole system gets to be more complex than I'd like. The chain winds up being: monitored server -> Ganglia -> Ganglia parser -> Graphite.

Looking at the Graphite Tools page I learned about Diamond which can collect metrics using a Python agent and send them directly to Graphite. It has some very useful collectors already and the big benefit, makes it very easy to add a new collector!

In about an hour I was able to make a collector for MongoDB and submit a pull request. The changeset was accepted making it my first contribution to an existing open-source project! I plan on creating more collectors for software that we are using as work. Next up is likely to be RabbitMQ.

And if you haven't, try Graphite!