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grobian / carbon-c-relay

Enhanced C implementation of Carbon relay, aggregator and rewriter
Apache License 2.0
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c graphite monitoring relays

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carbon-c-relay(1) -- graphite relay, aggregator and rewriter

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SYNOPSIS

carbon-c-relay -f config-file [ options ... ]

DESCRIPTION

carbon-c-relay accepts, cleanses, matches, rewrites, forwards and aggregates graphite metrics by listening for incoming connections and relaying the messages to other servers defined in its configuration. The core functionality is to route messages via flexible rules to the desired destinations.

carbon-c-relay is a simple program that reads its routing information from a file. The command line arguments allow to set the location for this file, as well as the amount of dispatchers (worker threads) to use for reading the data from incoming connections and passing them onto the right destination(s). The route file supports two main constructs: clusters and matches. The first define groups of hosts data metrics can be sent to, the latter define which metrics should be sent to which cluster. Aggregation rules are seen as matches. Rewrites are actions that directly affect the metric at the point in which they appear in the configuration.

For every metric received by the relay, cleansing is performed. The following changes are performed before any match, aggregate or rewrite rule sees the metric:

OPTIONS

These options control the behaviour of carbon-c-relay.

CONFIGURATION SYNTAX

The config file supports the following syntax, where comments start with a # character and can appear at any position on a line and suppress input until the end of that line:

cluster <name>
    < <forward | any_of | failover> [useall] |
      <carbon_ch | fnv1a_ch | jump_fnv1a_ch> [replication <count>] [dynamic] >
        <host[:port][=instance] [proto <udp | tcp>]
                                [type linemode]
                                [transport <plain | gzip | lz4 | snappy>
                                           [ssl | mtls <pemcert> <pemkey>]]> ...
    ;

cluster <name>
    file [ip]
        </path/to/file> ...
    ;

match
        <* | expression ...>
    [validate <expression> else <log | drop>]
    send to <cluster ... | blackhole>
    [stop]
    ;

rewrite <expression>
    into <replacement>
    ;

aggregate
        <expression> ...
    every <interval> seconds
    expire after <expiration> seconds
    [timestamp at <start | middle | end> of bucket]
    compute <sum | count | max | min | average |
             median | percentile<%> | variance | stddev> write to
        <metric>
    [compute ...]
    [send to <cluster ...>]
    [stop]
    ;

send statistics to <cluster ...>
    [stop]
    ;
statistics
    [submit every <interval> seconds]
    [reset counters after interval]
    [prefix with <prefix>]
    [send to <cluster ...>]
    [stop]
    ;

listen
    type linemode [transport <plain | gzip | lz4 | snappy>
                      [<ssl | mtls> <pemcert>
                          [protomin <tlsproto>] [protomax <tlsproto>]
                          [ciphers <ssl-ciphers>] [ciphersuites <tls-suite>]
                      ]
                  ]
        <<interface[:port] | port> proto <udp | tcp>> ...
        </ptah/to/file proto unix> ...
    ;
    # tlsproto: <ssl3 | tls1.0 | tls1.1 | tls1.2 | tls1.3>
    # ssl-ciphers: see ciphers(1)
    # tls-suite: see SSL_CTX_set_ciphersuites(3)

include </path/to/file/or/glob>
    ;

CLUSTERS

Multiple clusters can be defined, and need not to be referenced by a match rule. All clusters point to one or more hosts, except the file cluster which writes to files in the local filesystem. host may be an IPv4 or IPv6 address, or a hostname. Since host is followed by an optional : and port, for IPv6 addresses not to be interpreted wrongly, either a port must be given, or the IPv6 address surrounded by brackets, e.g. [::1]. Optional transport and proto clauses can be used to wrap the connection in a compression or encryption layer or specify the use of UDP or TCP to connect to the remote server. When omitted the connection defaults to a plain TCP connection. type can only be linemode at the moment, e.g. Python's pickle mode is not supported.

DNS hostnames are resolved to a single address, according to the preference rules in RFC 3484. The any_of, failover and forward clusters have an explicit useall flag that enables expansion for hostnames resolving to multiple addresses. Using this option, each address of any type becomes a cluster destination. This means for instance that both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are added.

There are two groups of cluster types, simple forwarding clusters and consistent hashing clusters.

MATCHES

Match rules are the way to direct incoming metrics to one or more clusters. Match rules are processed top to bottom as they are defined in the file. It is possible to define multiple matches in the same rule. Each match rule can send data to one or more clusters. Since match rules "fall through" unless the stop keyword is added, carefully crafted match expression can be used to target multiple clusters or aggregations. This ability allows to replicate metrics, as well as send certain metrics to alternative clusters with careful ordering and usage of the stop keyword. The special cluster blackhole discards any metrics sent to it. This can be useful for weeding out unwanted metrics in certain cases. Because throwing metrics away is pointless if other matches would accept the same data, a match with as destination the blackhole cluster, has an implicit stop. The validation clause adds a check to the data (what comes after the metric) in the form of a regular expression. When this expression matches, the match rule will execute as if no validation clause was present. However, if it fails, the match rule is aborted, and no metrics will be sent to destinations, this is the drop behaviour. When log is used, the metric is logged to stderr. Care should be taken with the latter to avoid log flooding. When a validate clause is present, destinations need not to be present, this allows for applying a global validation rule. Note that the cleansing rules are applied before validation is done, thus the data will not have duplicate spaces. The route using clause is used to perform a temporary modification to the key used for input to the consistent hashing routines. The primary purpose is to route traffic so that appropriate data is sent to the needed aggregation instances.

REWRITES

Rewrite rules take a regular expression as input to match incoming metrics, and transform them into the desired new metric name. In the replacement, backreferences are allowed to match capture groups defined in the input regular expression. A match of server\.(x|y|z)\. allows to use e.g. role.\1. in the substitution. A few caveats apply to the current implementation of rewrite rules. First, their location in the config file determines when the rewrite is performed. The rewrite is done in-place, as such a match rule before the rewrite would match the original name, a match rule after the rewrite no longer matches the original name. Care should be taken with the ordering, as multiple rewrite rules in succession can take place, e.g. a gets replaced by b and b gets replaced by c in a succeeding rewrite rule. The second caveat with the current implementation, is that the rewritten metric names are not cleansed, like newly incoming metrics are. Thus, double dots and potential dangerous characters can appear if the replacement string is crafted to produce them. It is the responsibility of the writer to make sure the metrics are clean. If this is an issue for routing, one can consider to have a rewrite-only instance that forwards all metrics to another instance that will do the routing. Obviously the second instance will cleanse the metrics as they come in. The backreference notation allows to lowercase and uppercase the replacement string with the use of the underscore (_) and carret (^) symbols following directly after the backslash. For example, role.\_1. as substitution will lowercase the contents of \1. The dot (.) can be used in a similar fashion, or followed after the underscore or caret to replace dots with underscores in the substitution. This can be handy for some situations where metrics are sent to graphite.

AGGREGATIONS

The aggregations defined take one or more input metrics expressed by one or more regular expresions, similar to the match rules. Incoming metrics are aggregated over a period of time defined by the interval in seconds. Since events may arrive a bit later in time, the expiration time in seconds defines when the aggregations should be considered final, as no new entries are allowed to be added any more. On top of an aggregation multiple aggregations can be computed. They can be of the same or different aggregation types, but should write to a unique new metric. The metric names can include back references like in rewrite expressions, allowing for powerful single aggregation rules that yield in many aggregations. When no send to clause is given, produced metrics are sent to the relay as if they were submitted from the outside, hence match and aggregation rules apply to those. Care should be taken that loops are avoided this way. For this reason, the use of the send to clause is encouraged, to direct the output traffic where possible. Like for match rules, it is possible to define multiple cluster targets. Also, like match rules, the stop keyword applies to control the flow of metrics in the matching process.

STATISTICS

The send statistics to construct is deprecated and will be removed in the next release. Use the special statistics construct instead.

The statistics construct can control a couple of things about the (internal) statistics produced by the relay. The send to target can be used to avoid router loops by sending the statistics to a certain destination cluster(s). By default the metrics are prefixed with carbon.relays.<hostname>, where hostname is determinted on startup and can be overridden using the -H argument. This prefix can be set using the prefix with clause similar to a rewrite rule target. The input match in this case is the pre-set regular expression ^(([^.]+)(\..*)?)$ on the hostname. As such, one can see that the default prefix is set by carbon.relays.\.1. Note that this uses the replace-dot-with-underscore replacement feature from rewrite rules. Given the input expression, the following match groups are available: \1 the entire hostname, \2 the short hostname and \3 the domainname (with leading dot). It may make sense to replace the default by something like carbon.relays.\_2 for certain scenarios, to always use the lowercased short hostname, which following the expression doesn't contain a dot. By default, the metrics are submitted every 60 seconds, this can be changed using the submit every <interval> seconds clause.
To obtain a more compatible set of values to carbon-cache.py, use the reset counters after interval clause to make values non-cumulative, that is, they will report the change compared to the previous value.

LISTENERS

The ports and protocols the relay should listen for incoming connections can be specified using the listen directive. Currently, all listeners need to be of linemode type. An optional compression or encryption wrapping can be specified for the port and optional interface given by ip address, or unix socket by file. When interface is not specified, the any interface on all available ip protocols is assumed. If no listen directive is present, the relay will use the default listeners for port 2003 on tcp and udp, plus the unix socket /tmp/.s.carbon-c-relay.2003. This typically expands to 5 listeners on an IPv6 enabled system. The default matches the behaviour of versions prior to v3.2.

INCLUDES

In case configuration becomes very long, or is managed better in separate files, the include directive can be used to read another file. The given file will be read in place and added to the router configuration at the time of inclusion. The end result is one big route configuration. Multiple include statements can be used throughout the configuration file. The positioning will influence the order of rules as normal. Beware that recursive inclusion (include from an included file) is supported, and currently no safeguards exist for an inclusion loop. For what is worth, this feature likely is best used with simple configuration files (e.g. not having include in them).

EXAMPLES

carbon-c-relay evolved over time, growing features on demand as the tool proved to be stable and fitting the job well. Below follow some annotated examples of constructs that can be used with the relay.

Clusters can be defined as much as necessary. They receive data from match rules, and their type defines which members of the cluster finally get the metric data. The simplest cluster form is a forward cluster:

cluster send-through
    forward
        10.1.0.1
    ;

Any metric sent to the send-through cluster would simply be forwarded to the server at IPv4 address 10.1.0.1. If we define multiple servers, all of those servers would get the same metric, thus:

cluster send-through
    forward
        10.1.0.1
        10.2.0.1
    ;

The above results in a duplication of metrics send to both machines. This can be useful, but most of the time it is not. The any_of cluster type is like forward, but it sends each incoming metric to any of the members. The same example with such cluster would be:

cluster send-to-any-one
    any_of 10.1.0.1:2010 10.1.0.1:2011;

This would implement a multipath scenario, where two servers are used, the load between them is spread, but should any of them fail, all metrics are sent to the remaining one. This typically works well for upstream relays, or for balancing carbon-cache processes running on the same machine. Should any member become unavailable, for instance due to a rolling restart, the other members receive the traffic. If it is necessary to have true fail-over, where the secondary server is only used if the first is down, the following would implement that:

cluster try-first-then-second
    failover 10.1.0.1:2010 10.1.0.1:2011;

These types are different from the two consistent hash cluster types:

cluster graphite
    carbon_ch
        127.0.0.1:2006=a
        127.0.0.1:2007=b
        127.0.0.1:2008=c
    ;

If a member in this example fails, all metrics that would go to that member are kept in the queue, waiting for the member to return. This is useful for clusters of carbon-cache machines where it is desirable that the same metric ends up on the same server always. The carbon_ch cluster type is compatible with carbon-relay consistent hash, and can be used for existing clusters populated by carbon-relay. For new clusters, however, it is better to use the fnv1a_ch cluster type, for it is faster, and allows to balance over the same address but different ports without an instance number, in constrast to carbon_ch.

Because we can use multiple clusters, we can also replicate without the use of the forward cluster type, in a more intelligent way:

cluster dc-old
    carbon_ch replication 2
        10.1.0.1
        10.1.0.2
        10.1.0.3
    ;
cluster dc-new1
    fnv1a_ch replication 2
        10.2.0.1
        10.2.0.2
        10.2.0.3
    ;
cluster dc-new2
    fnv1a_ch replication 2
        10.3.0.1
        10.3.0.2
        10.3.0.3
    ;

match *
    send to dc-old
    ;
match *
    send to
        dc-new1
        dc-new2
    stop
    ;

In this example all incoming metrics are first sent to dc-old, then dc-new1 and finally to dc-new2. Note that the cluster type of dc-old is different. Each incoming metric will be send to 2 members of all three clusters, thus replicating to in total 6 destinations. For each cluster the destination members are computed independently. Failure of clusters or members does not affect the others, since all have individual queues. The above example could also be written using three match rules for each dc, or one match rule for all three dcs. The difference is mainly in performance, the number of times the incoming metric has to be matched against an expression. The stop rule in dc-new match rule is not strictly necessary in this example, because there are no more following match rules. However, if the match would target a specific subset, e.g. ^sys\., and more clusters would be defined, this could be necessary, as for instance in the following abbreviated example:

cluster dc1-sys ... ;
cluster dc2-sys ... ;

cluster dc1-misc ... ;
cluster dc2-misc ... ;

match ^sys\. send to dc1-sys;
match ^sys\. send to dc2-sys stop;

match * send to dc1-misc;
match * send to dc2-misc stop;

As can be seen, without the stop in dc2-sys' match rule, all metrics starting with sys. would also be send to dc1-misc and dc2-misc. It can be that this is desired, of course, but in this example there is a dedicated cluster for the sys metrics.

Suppose there would be some unwanted metric that unfortunately is generated, let's assume some bad/old software. We don't want to store this metric. The blackhole cluster is suitable for that, when it is harder to actually whitelist all wanted metrics. Consider the following:

match
        some_legacy1$
        some_legacy2$
    send to blackhole
    stop;

This would throw away all metrics that end with some_legacy, that would otherwise be hard to filter out. Since the order matters, it can be used in a construct like this:

cluster old ... ;
cluster new ... ;

match * send to old;

match unwanted send to blackhole stop;

match * send to new;

In this example the old cluster would receive the metric that's unwanted for the new cluster. So, the order in which the rules occur does matter for the execution.

Validation can be used to ensure the data for metrics is as expected. A global validation for just number (no floating point) values could be:

match *
    validate ^[0-9]+\ [0-9]+$ else drop
    ;

(Note the escape with backslash \ of the space, you might be able to use \s or [:space:] instead, this depends on your configured regex implementation.)

The validation clause can exist on every match rule, so in principle, the following is valid:

match ^foo
    validate ^[0-9]+\ [0-9]+$ else drop
    send to integer-cluster
    ;
match ^foo
    validate ^[0-9.e+-]+\ [0-9.e+-]+$ else drop
    send to float-cluster
    stop;

Note that the behaviour is different in the previous two examples. When no send to clusters are specified, a validation error makes the match behave like the stop keyword is present. Likewise, when validation passes, processing continues with the next rule. When destination clusters are present, the match respects the stop keyword as normal. When specified, processing will always stop when specified so. However, if validation fails, the rule does not send anything to the destination clusters, the metric will be dropped or logged, but never sent.

The relay is capable of rewriting incoming metrics on the fly. This process is done based on regular expressions with capture groups that allow to substitute parts in a replacement string. Rewrite rules allow to cleanup metrics from applications, or provide a migration path. In it's simplest form a rewrite rule looks like this:

rewrite ^server\.(.+)\.(.+)\.([a-zA-Z]+)([0-9]+)
    into server.\_1.\2.\3.\3\4
    ;

In this example a metric like server.DC.role.name123 would be transformed into server.dc.role.name.name123. For rewrite rules hold the same as for matches, that their order matters. Hence to build on top of the old/new cluster example done earlier, the following would store the original metric name in the old cluster, and the new metric name in the new cluster:

match * send to old;

rewrite ... ;

match * send to new;

Note that after the rewrite, the original metric name is no longer available, as the rewrite happens in-place.

Aggregations are probably the most complex part of carbon-c-relay. Two ways of specifying aggregates are supported by carbon-c-relay. The first, static rules, are handled by an optimiser which tries to fold thousands of rules into groups to make the matching more efficient. The second, dynamic rules, are very powerful compact definitions with possibly thousands of internal instantiations. A typical static aggregation looks like:

aggregate
        ^sys\.dc1\.somehost-[0-9]+\.somecluster\.mysql\.replication_delay
        ^sys\.dc2\.somehost-[0-9]+\.somecluster\.mysql\.replication_delay
    every 10 seconds
    expire after 35 seconds
    timestamp at end of bucket
    compute sum write to
        mysql.somecluster.total_replication_delay
    compute average write to
        mysql.somecluster.average_replication_delay
    compute max write to
        mysql.somecluster.max_replication_delay
    compute count write to
        mysql.somecluster.replication_delay_metric_count
    ;

In this example, four aggregations are produced from the incoming matching metrics. In this example we could have written the two matches as one, but for demonstration purposes we did not. Obviously they can refer to different metrics, if that makes sense. The every 10 seconds clause specifies in what interval the aggregator can expect new metrics to arrive. This interval is used to produce the aggregations, thus each 10 seconds 4 new metrics are generated from the data received sofar. Because data may be in transit for some reason, or generation stalled, the expire after clause specifies how long the data should be kept before considering a data bucket (which is aggregated) to be complete. In the example, 35 was used, which means after 35 seconds the first aggregates are produced. It also means that metrics can arrive 35 seconds late, and still be taken into account. The exact time at which the aggregate metrics are produced is random between 0 and interval (10 in this case) seconds after the expiry time. This is done to prevent thundering herds of metrics for large aggregation sets. The timestamp that is used for the aggregations can be specified to be the start, middle or end of the bucket. Original carbon-aggregator.py uses start, while carbon-c-relay's default has always been end. The compute clauses demonstrate a single aggregation rule can produce multiple aggregates, as often is the case. Internally, this comes for free, since all possible aggregates are always calculated, whether or not they are used. The produced new metrics are resubmitted to the relay, hence matches defined before in the configuration can match output of the aggregator. It is important to avoid loops, that can be generated this way. In general, splitting aggregations to their own carbon-c-relay instance, such that it is easy to forward the produced metrics to another relay instance is a good practice.

The previous example could also be written as follows to be dynamic:

aggregate
        ^sys\.dc[0-9].(somehost-[0-9]+)\.([^.]+)\.mysql\.replication_delay
    every 10 seconds
    expire after 35 seconds
    compute sum write to
        mysql.host.\1.replication_delay
    compute sum write to
        mysql.host.all.replication_delay
    compute sum write to
        mysql.cluster.\2.replication_delay
    compute sum write to
        mysql.cluster.all.replication_delay
    ;

Here a single match, results in four aggregations, each of a different scope. In this example aggregation based on hostname and cluster are being made, as well as the more general all targets, which in this example have both identical values. Note that with this single aggregation rule, both per-cluster, per-host and total aggregations are produced. Obviously, the input metrics define which hosts and clusters are produced.

With use of the send to clause, aggregations can be made more intuitive and less error-prone. Consider the below example:

cluster graphite fnv1a_ch ip1 ip2 ip3;

aggregate ^sys\.somemetric
    every 60 seconds
    expire after 75 seconds
    compute sum write to
        sys.somemetric
    send to graphite
    stop
    ;

match * send to graphite;

It sends all incoming metrics to the graphite cluster, except the sys.somemetric ones, which it replaces with a sum of all the incoming ones. Without a stop in the aggregate, this causes a loop, and without the send to, the metric name can't be kept its original name, for the output now directly goes to the cluster.

When configuring cluster you might want to check how the metrics will be routed and hashed. That's what the -t flag is for. For the following configuration: 

cluster graphite_swarm_odd
    fnv1a_ch replication 1
        host01.dom:2003=31F7A65E315586AC198BD798B6629CE4903D089947
        host03.dom:2003=9124E29E0C92EB63B3834C1403BD2632AA7508B740
        host05.dom:2003=B653412CD96B13C797658D2C48D952AEC3EB667313
;

cluster graphite_swarm_even
    fnv1a_ch replication 1
        host02.dom:2003=31F7A65E315586AC198BD798B6629CE4903D089947
        host04.dom:2003=9124E29E0C92EB63B3834C1403BD2632AA7508B740
        host06.dom:2003=B653412CD96B13C797658D2C48D952AEC3EB667313

;

match *
    send to
        graphite_swarm_odd
        graphite_swarm_even
    stop
;

Running the command: echo "my.super.metric" | carbon-c-relay -f config.conf -t, will result in: 

[...]
match
    * -> my.super.metric
    fnv1a_ch(graphite_swarm_odd)
        host03.dom:2003
    fnv1a_ch(graphite_swarm_even)
        host04.dom:2003
    stop

You now know that your metric my.super.metric will be hashed and arrive on the host03 and host04 machines. Adding the -d flag will increase the amount of information by showing you the hashring

STATISTICS

When carbon-c-relay is run without -d or -s arguments, statistics will be produced. By default they are sent to the relay itself in the form of carbon.relays.<hostname>.*. See the statistics construct to override this prefix, sending interval and values produced. While many metrics have a similar name to what carbon-cache.py would produce, their values are likely different. By default, most values are running counters which only increase over time. The use of the nonNegativeDerivative() function from graphite is useful with these.

The following metrics are produced under the carbon.relays.<hostname> namespace:

BUGS

Please report them at: https://github.com/grobian/carbon-c-relay/issues

AUTHOR

Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org>

SEE ALSO

All other utilities from the graphite stack.

This project aims to be a fast replacement of the original Carbon relay. carbon-c-relay aims to deliver performance and configurability. Carbon is single threaded, and sending metrics to multiple consistent-hash clusters requires chaining of relays. This project provides a multithreaded relay which can address multiple targets and clusters for each and every metric based on pattern matches.

There are a couple more replacement projects out there, which are carbon-relay-ng and graphite-relay.

Compared to carbon-relay-ng, this project does provide carbon's consistent-hash routing. graphite-relay, which does this, however doesn't do metric-based matches to direct the traffic, which this project does as well. To date, carbon-c-relay can do aggregations, failover targets and more.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This program was originally developed for Booking.com, which approved that the code was published and released as Open Source on GitHub, for which the author would like to express his gratitude. Development has continued since with the help of many contributors suggesting features, reporting bugs, adding patches and more to make carbon-c-relay into what it is today.