graphyte 1.5

graphyte is a small Python library that sends data to a Graphite metrics server (Carbon). We wrote it because the existing graphitesend library didn’t support Python 3, and it also required gevent for asyncronous use. graphyte is compatible with Python 3.4+ as well as Python 2.7, and uses the standard library’s threading module for asynchronous use.

The library is on the Python Package Index (PyPI), so to install it, fire up a command prompt, activate your virtualenv if you’re using one, and type:

pip install graphyte

Using graphyte is simple – just call init() to initialize the default sender and then send() to send a message. For example, to send system.sync.foo.bar 42 {timestamp}\n to graphite.example.com:2003 synchronously:

import graphyte
graphyte.init('graphite.example.com', prefix='system.sync')
graphyte.send('foo.bar', 42)

If you want to send asynchronously on a background thread (for example, in a web server context), just specify a send interval. For example, this will setup a background thread to send every 10 seconds:

graphyte.init('graphite.example.com', prefix='system.async', interval=10)
graphyte.send('foo.bar', 42)

If you want to send tagged metrics, the usage is as follows:

graphite.send('foo.bar', 42, tags={'ding': 'dong'})

For more advanced usage, for example if you want to send to multiple servers or if you want to subclass Sender, you can instantiate instances of Sender directly. For example, to instantiate two senders sending to different servers (one synchronous, one using a background thread with send interval 10 seconds), use something like the following:

sender1 = graphyte.Sender('graphite1.example.com', prefix='system.one')
sender2 = graphyte.Sender('graphite2.example.com', prefix='system.two', interval=10)
sender1.send('foo.bar1', 42)
sender2.send('foo.bar2', 43)

If you want to send via UDP instead of TCP, just add protocol='udp' to the init() or Sender() call.

Or, to customize how messages are logged or sent to the socket, subclass Sender and override send_message (or even send_socket if you want to override logging and exception handling):

class CustomSender(graphyte.Sender):
    def send_message(self, message):
        print('Sending bytes in some custom way: {!r}'.format(message))

Socket sending errors are logged using the Python logging system (using logger name “graphyte”). If the sender is initialized with log_sends=True, all sends are logged at the INFO level.

You can also use graphyte to send metrics directly from the command line:

python -m graphyte foo.bar 42

There are command line arguments to specify the server and port and other configuration. Type python -m graphyte --help for help.

Read the code in graphyte.py for more details – it’s pretty small!

graphyte was written by Ben Hoyt for Jetsetter and is licensed with a permissive MIT license (see LICENSE.txt).