Docker is a toolkit and a daemon which makes running foreign applications convenient, via containers. This tutorial will help you run metrictank, its dependencies, and grafana for dashboarding, with minimal hassle.

docker installation instructions You will also need to install version >=1.6 of docker-compose

If you already have go installed, you can just:

go get github.com/raintank/metrictank
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/raintank/metrictank

If you don't, you can just use git:

git clone https://github.com/raintank/metrictank.git
cd metrictank

If you have neither, just download the zip, extract it somewhere and cd into the metrictank directory.

The stack will listen on the following ports:

• 2003 tcp (metrictank's carbon input)
• 3000 tcp (grafana's http port)
• 6060 tcp (metrictank's internal endpoint)
• 8080 tcp (the graphite api query endpoint)
• 8125 udp (statsd endpoint)
• 9042 tcp (cassandra)

If you already have something else listen to that port (such as a carbon or grafana server), shut it down, as it will conflict.

Inside your copy of the repository, you can bring up the stack like so:

cd docker/docker-standard
docker-compose up

If this gives you the error service 'version' doesn't have any configuration options, your version of docker-compose is too old and you need to update to >=1.6.

A bunch of text will whiz past on your screen, but you should see

metrictank_1     | waiting for cassandra:9042 to become up...
statsdaemon_1    | 2016/12/04 15:30:21 ERROR: dialing metrictank:2003 failed - dial tcp 172.18.0.5:2003: getsockopt: connection refused. will retry
metrictank_1     | waiting for cassandra:9042 to become up...
statsdaemon_1    | 2016/12/04 15:30:22 ERROR: dialing metrictank:2003 failed - dial tcp 172.18.0.5:2003: getsockopt: connection refused

And a little bit later you should see that metrictank starts its listener and statsdaemon connects to metrictank:

metrictank_1    | 2016/12/04 15:30:34 [I] metricIndex initialized in 326.379951ms. starting data consumption
metrictank_1    | 2016/12/04 15:30:34 [I] carbon-in: listening on :2003/tcp
metrictank_1    | 2016/12/04 15:30:34 [I] API Listening on: http://:6060/
statsdaemon_1   | 2016/12/04 15:30:35 now connected to metrictank:2003

Once the stack is up, metrictank should be running on port 6060.
If you're running Docker engine natively, you can connect using localhost. If you're using Docker Toolbox (which runs containers inside a VirtualBox VM), the host will be the IP address returned by docker-machine ip.

$ curl http://localhost:6060
OK
$ curl http://localhost:6060/node
{"name":"default","version":"0.5.7-67-g3be576c","primary":true,"primaryChange":"2016-11-15T08:13:12.819435983Z","state":"NodeReady","started":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z","stateChange":"2016-11-15T08:13:16.591748594Z"}

In your browser, open Grafana at http://localhost:3000 (or your docker-machine address) and log in as admin:admin.
In the upper left Grafana menu, choose Data Sources. On the next page, click the Add data source button.
Add a new data source with with these settings:

• Name: metrictank
• Default: yes
• Type: Graphite
• Url: http://localhost:8080
• Access: direct (not proxy)

When you hit save, Grafana should succeed in talking to the data source.

Note: it also works with proxy mode but then you have to enter http://graphite-api:8080 as uri.

Now let's see some data. If you go to Dashboards, New and add a new graph panel. In the metrics tab you should see a bunch of metrics already in the root hierarchy:

• service_is_statsdaemon: statsdaemon's own internal metrics which it sends to metrictank's carbon port.
• metrictank.stats: internal stats reported by metrictank
• metrictank.usage: usage metrics reported by metrictank. See Usage reporting It may take a few minutes for the usage metrics to show up.
• stats: these are metrics coming from graphite-api, aggregated by statsdaemon and sent back to metrictank every second.

Note that metrictank is setup to track every metric on a 1-second granularity. If you wish to use it for less frequent metrics, you have to modify the storage-schemas.conf, just like with graphite.

You can also send your own data into metrictank using the carbon input, like so:

echo "example.metric 123 $(date +%s)" | nc localhost 2003

Or into statsdaemon - which will compute statistical summaries - like so:

echo "hits:1|c" | nc -w 1 -u localhost 8125

Now for something neat!
There is an extensive dashboard on grafana.net that displays all vital metrictank stats.

So go to the dashboard dropdown -> import -> and paste in https://grafana.net/dashboards/279 into the Grafana.net url field. It will show a dialog with a choice of which graphite datasource to use, for which you can enter metrictank.

You should now have a functioning dashboard showing all metrictank's internal metrics which it reports into itself.

Another dashboard you can import for instant gratification is the statsdaemon dashboard, which shows you metrics about the metrics. Very meta.

Now you can send in more data using the plaintext protocol or using any of the plethora of tools that can send data in carbon format , create dashboards (or import them from grafana.net), etc.

If anything doesn't work, please let us know via a ticket on github or reach out on slack. See Community

You can shut down the stack by just hitting Ctrl-C on your running docker-compose up command.

You can remove the containers like so:

docker-compose stop

To clean up all data so you can start fresh, run this after you stopped the stack:

docker rm -v $(docker ps -a -q -f status=exited)

This will remove the stopped containers and their data volumes.