Autodetecting Your RSS Feed in the Browser

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I noticed recently that my site didn't have the Syndication Icon icon anymore. I'm not sure when I lost it but to add it back I just added the link field that lets browsers know where my Atom feed is. Simple enough to add <link type="application/atom+xml" rel="alternate" href="/atom.xml"/> to the head of the page.

MongoDB Lock Percentage in Graphite

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While investigating our MongoDB lock ratio I was asking around to see what common lock percentages were among those who I know use MongoDB. I discovered that despite having similar setups to what we are using that they didn't know how to get the lock percentage from Graphite.

Using Diamond you can easily get all of the MongoDB server status metrics into Graphite but the globalLock.ratio is a bit misleading in that it is based on the total uptime of Mongo, which could be a while, and not on recent usage patterns. And in 2.2 it disappears anyway!

The metrics that are included though that help are globalLock.totalTime and globalLock.lockTime which can be used to find the lock ratio/percentage over whatever sampling period you use.

The percentage winds up being scale(divideSeries(derivative(servers.MONGOHOSTNAME.MongoDBCollector.globalLock.lockTime),derivative(servers.MONGOHOSTNAME.MongoDBCollector.globalLock.totalTime)),100). You can remove the scale function to get the ratio. This doesn't work with globbing in Graphite though. You can scale the lockTime though to be able to get a globbable lock ratio for all of your Mongo servers, the exact value will depend on the sampling period.

SQL-to-Graphite

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I released a package SQL-to-Graphite that aims to easily save the results of SQL queries into Graphite.

We use this and similar scripts (I'm going to move over to using this) at work in order to collect global metrics about our systems. I typically count any table that has a status column and the average/max age of any records that should be updated periodically.

I made this package once I hit the second repository where I would have to write a script to do this. It should be compatible with any database supported by SQLAlchemy.

After installing (pip install sql-to-graphite) you can run the sql-to-graphite command.

With a file like:

And start getting metrics into Graphite!