Visage

Visage is a web interface for viewing collectd statistics.

It also provides a JSON interface onto collectd's RRD data, giving you an easy way to mash up the data.

Features

  • renders graphs in the browser, and retrieves data asynchronously
  • interactive graph keys, to highlight lines and toggle line visibility
  • drop-down or mouse selection of timeframes (also rendered asynchronously)
  • JSON interface onto collectd RRDs

Here, have a graph:

Something I prepared earlier.

Or check out a live demo.

Installing

N.B: Visage must be deployed on a machine where collectd stores its stats in RRD.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, to install dependencies run:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential librrd-ruby ruby ruby-dev rubygems collectd

Then install the app with:

gem install visage-app

CentOS/RHEL

CentOS/RHEL 5

Visage uses yajl-ruby to work with JSON, which requires Ruby >= 1.8.6. CentOS/RHEL 5 ship with Ruby 1.8.5, so you will need to use Ruby Enterprise Edition.

Endpoint provide packages for REE and a Yum repository to ease installation.

Follow the above instructions for installing REE, and then run:

sudo yum install -y librrd-dev ruby rubygems collectd
gem install librrd

Then install the app with:

gem install visage-app

CentOS/RHEL 6+

On CentOS 6, to install dependencies run:

sudo yum install -y ruby-RRDtool ruby ruby-devel rubygems collectd

Then install the app with:

gem install visage-app

Mac OS X

Visage is not supported on Mac OS X, as RRDtool is a pain in the arse on that platform. It's highly recommended you use Vagrant to fire up an Ubuntu box to run Visage.

Running

You can try out Visage quickly with:

visage-app start

Then paste the URL from the output into your browser.

If you get a command not found when running the above command (RubyGems likely isn't on your PATH), try this instead:

$(dirname $(dirname $(gem which visage-app)))/bin/visage-app start

Deploying

Visage can be deployed on Apache with Passenger:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

Visage can attempt to generate an Apache vhost config for use with Passenger:

visage-app genapache
<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName ubuntu.localdomain
  ServerAdmin [email protected]

  DocumentRoot /home/user/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/visage-app-0.1.0/lib/visage-app/public

  <Directory "/home/user/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/visage-app-0.1.0/lib/visage-app/public">
     Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
     AllowOverride None
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Copypasta this into your system's Apache config structure and tune to taste.

To do this on Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo -s
visage-app genapache > /etc/apache2/sites-available/visage
a2ensite visage
a2dissite default
service apache2 reload

Then head to your Apache instance and Visage will be up and running.

Configuring

Visage looks for two environment variables when starting up:

  • CONFIG_PATH, an entry on the configuration file search path
  • RRDDIR, the location of collectd's RRDs

Visage has a configuration search path which can be used for overriding individual files. By default it has one entry: $VISAGE_ROOT/lib/visage/config/. You can set the CONFIG_PATH environment variable to add another directory to the config load path. This directory will be searched when loading up configuration files:

CONFIG_PATH=/var/lib/visage visage-app start

This is especially useful when you want to deploy + run Visage from an installed gem with Passenger. e.g.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName monitoring.example.org
  ServerAdmin [email protected]

  SetEnv CONFIG_PATH /var/lib/visage
  SetEnv RRDDIR /opt/collectd/var/lib/collectd

  DocumentRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/visage-app-0.3.0/lib/visage/public
  <Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
  </Directory>

  LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log common
</VirtualHost>

Also to keep in mind when deploying with Passenger, the CONFIG_PATH directory and its files need to have the correct ownership:

chown nobody:nogroup -R /var/lib/visage

Developing + testing

Check out the code with:

git clone git://github.com/auxesis/visage.git

Install the development dependencies with:

gem install bundler
bundle install

Run all cucumber features:

rake features

And run the app with:

shotgun lib/visage-app/config.ru

To create and install a new gem from the current source tree:

rake install

Releasing

  1. Bump the version in lib/visage-app/version.rb
  2. Add an entry to CHANGELOG.md
  3. git commit everything.
  4. Build the gem with rake build
  5. Push the gem to RubyGems.org with rake push

Licencing

Visage is MIT licensed.

Visage is distributed with Highcharts. Torstein Hønsi has kindly granted permission to distribute Highcharts under the GPLv2 as part of Visage.

If you ever need an excellent JavaScript charting library, please consider purchasing a commercial license for Highcharts.

TODO

  • add natural language support for timeframes (default view: 1 week ago)
  • add sparklines to profile view
  • add checkbox to enable live updates on all graphs