Graphite Server Virtual Box Appliance

I have made some additional improvements to my automated Graphite installer. Last time I posted the install script, it was admittedly  missing several things, but the new one goes from ./install.sh to the Graphite web console in one go.

At any rate, the new installer has significantly eased the process of creating VM appliances for Graphite which I have made available for download if you are interested in taking Graphite for a test drive, or you need a pre-built development environment. Since the VMs, as configured, are resource limited, I am not sure if they are suitable for any production use, but if you bump up the CPUs, the memory and modify the setup to use some fast native (or SAN) disks for the Whisper storage, I imagine they would be pretty decent.

• Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 32 bit, Graphite 0.9.8 (928,977,606 bytes)
• Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 64 bit, Graphite 0.9.8 (869,840,705 bytes)

Here's some details you should know:

• Created with Virtual Box 4.0.6
• The OS user is helios. The password is helios.
• The Graphite admin user is helios. The password is helios. Now that I think about it, the user's email address is graphite@heliosdev.org so you might want to review my summary below on how you can change this.
• Once you start the VM, the Graphite Console is available at http://localhost and remotely at whatever IP you designate. (Out of the box, the NIC is configured for bridging).
• The Graphite install script and supporting files are in /home/helios/graphite.
• The carbon listener is started by /etc/init.d/carbon which runs the process as user www-data and I recommend you stick to using it. If you start carbon directly with sudo, the process will run as root and may create files that are subsequently not readable by www-data.
• The carbon [linetext] listener listens on port 2003.

Changing the Graphite Admin User

The user accounts are stored in a sqlite database/file /opt/graphite/storage/graphite.db,  specifically in a table called auth_user. You can run the sqlitebrowser GUI tool and edit the file directly  (using sudo). Or, you can delete the file (using sudo) and re-initialize as follows:  (using sudo) 

1. cd /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite 
2. sudo python manage.py syncdb

This will recreate the database and prompt you to create a new admin user.

And I thank HostMonster for their nicely priced hosting that affords me the ability to serve these files.

Next post perhaps I will explain:

• Why did I build this appliance using Desktop instead of Server ?
• Where is the VMware version of this appliance ?
• Where and when is the OpenTrace client for passing collected JMX metrics to Graphite ?