Table of Contents
Introduction
We offer a free trial period to ensure that our customers use MetricFire successfully. But often when someone signs up for a trial they may not know where to start. This is a guide on how to use your trial to test your data and see if MetricFire is right for your use case.
Each use case is different so it is important to book a call with our technical support team so we can help you utilize your free trial optimally for you. Create a MetricFire account for free and see how our system works.
Overview of the platform
MetricFire is a platform for monitoring infrastructure, systems, and applications. It provides a set of open-source monitoring tools for storing, processing, analyzing, and visualizing metrics. MetricFire provides powerful monitoring capabilities so you can easily understand how complex systems work.
For cloud or local monitoring, MetricFire offers the most popular open-source monitoring software services Graphite and Grafana. There are also preconfigured plugins for several other projects such as StatsD and collectd. With MetricFire you get all listed tools in your hosted environment as a single product. MetricFire can be used for monitoring networks, servers, applications, and business intelligence.
Grafana
Grafana is an open-source monitoring tool for visualizing metrics no matter where those metrics are stored. It allows you to easily create, customize, view, and browse dashboards. With Grafana you can visualize your system metrics, track the number of incoming requests for your web application, and monitor the status of your platform components.
Grafana dashboards consist of a group of widgets. Apart from this, it provides a lot of other features such as folders, variables, time ranges, and auto-refresh of widgets. Dashboards have many features that allow you to customize charts, and make them beautiful, convenient, and understandable.
To visualize metrics, you need to create a custom panel. There are a lot of types of panels in Grafana, including Graph, Singlestat, Dashlist, Table, Text, and others. Then, you need to select a data source and create a query to get the metrics. Finally, use the tools available in Grafana to customize the charts. To extend the functionality of Grafana, you can also install add-ons.
Sending metrics
To visualize your metrics with the monitoring solutions provided by MetricFire, you need to send them to MetricFire. This can be done very easily. To do this, you need to use tools that allow you to configure the automatic process of transferring metrics to MetricFire. You can also get a code template in different programming languages and send metrics using it. Below in this article, we will consider the process of sending metrics to MetricFire in more detail.
Alerts
MetricFire contains alerts with which you can be notified of various events. For example, you can set up notifications when your metrics are out of bounds, when a metric has not been received within a specified time period, and so on. To receive notifications, you can choose the communication channel that is convenient for you: email, Slack, or PagerDuty.
Addons
To expand the functionality of MetricFire, as well as to integrate it with third-party software products, there are a lot of add-ons. Using our system, you can easily find and install the add-on you need. Integrate various software products from Amazon, Heroku, AWS, Cisco, Aruba, Azure, and more with MetricFire add-ons.
Teammate
The MetricFire team of specialists is constantly working to improve the quality of our product. We try to make the process of monitoring your systems simple and pleasant so that you can easily understand the processes that occur in your system and keep it working. If you have any difficulties, our technical support team is always happy to help you and answer any questions regarding the operation of our system.
Try the free trial version of the MetricFire platform or book a demo with our team to learn more about all its features.
Best Practices for testing data
For the successful development and maintenance of automated systems, it is very important to determine the right strategy for managing test data to make it flexible, scalable, and easy to maintain. Let’s look at the best practices for managing test data.
- Test data can be created manually, obtained from a test environment, among clients, or automatically generated by special tools.
- Test data should always be placed in a separate file. This allows you to quickly change them if necessary without the need to search through the code.
- Test data should simulate real data and not disclose personal user data.
- Automatically generate unique test data for each run of automated testing, where possible. Create a mechanism to automatically update data in real-time. This will allow you to keep your data up to date and avoid reusing the same data over and over again.
- If your project contains several test environments, then this must be taken into account when creating test data. There is data that is common to all environments and data that is specific to each environment. All common data must be placed in one file (or several, if your application logic requires this). Then, for each test environment, you need to create a separate file and put the data that is specific to this environment.
- A similar practice also applies to multilingual projects. All data that is shared is placed in one file. Specific data for each language is placed in separate files for each language.
How to test MetricFire
To get started with MetricFire, you need to register. To do this, use our signup wizard. After that, go to the control panel and find your API key. This is a unique per-account key that you will use to send metrics to MetricFire. Then, you need to send your metrics to MetricFire. How to do this is described in detail in the next section. Once your metrics are saved, create and customize amazing Grafana dashboards to visualize and analyze them.
Sending your metrics to MetricFire
The process of sending metrics to MetricFire includes two stages: first, the metrics need to be collected, and then transferred to MetricFire for analysis and visualization. The process of collecting metrics can be done in several different ways.
1. Use a hosted Graphite agent. To automatically configure the components for collecting metrics, run the following command:
curl -s https://XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@www.hostedgraphite.com/agent/installer/deb/ | sudo sh
This command uses an API key that is unique to each MetricFire account. You can find it in your control panel.
3. Use code. MetricFire allows you to get a ready-made code snippet that you can use in your application to collect metrics.
4. Use agent and hosted Graphite add-on. The add-on provides a dashboard for the system’s key metrics exported by the Graphite agent. Enable the "Hosted Graphite Agent (Basic)" add-on in the MetricFire toolbar. Click the "Regenerate Dashboard" button to set up Grafana with this add-on. You will see the command to install the agent on the system which you want to send metrics from. Run the given command and your system will start sending data to MetricFire.
To send metrics to MetricFire you can use StatsD or collectd. These tools are similar but differ in the type of data they send. Collectd is used to collect and report system metrics and StatsD is used to report application-related statistics. These tools run in the background using a daemon process. The process of integrating them with MetricFire is almost the same and very simple. To get started, you need to sign in to your MetricFire account. Then, go to the add-ons section and you will see add-ons available for both StatsD and collectd under Data Source Add-on. After setting up the necessary tools, you can start planning what data to collect and send.
Conclusion
In this article, we have examined in detail the main components of the MetricFire platform, told how to start working with MetricFire step by step, and how to send metrics to it. If you have any further questions, you can schedule a call with our technical team. We’ll be happy to help you!
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