A time series database is a massively useful tool for system reporting and monitoring. By storing series of simple values attached to timestamps, an ops team can see how fast their application is processing data, how much traffic they're serving, and how many resources they're consuming. From this data they can determine how well their application is working, track down issues in the system, and plan for future resource needs.

There have been a lot of new databases and tools developed to create, store, and consume time series data, and existing databases are being enhanced to better support time series data.

With the new release of ETL::Yertl, we can easily translate SQL database queries into metrics for monitoring and reporting. I've been using these new features to monitor the CPAN Testers application.

To monitor the CPAN Testers project, I need to make sure that incoming test reports are being processed into useful data. When a report is written to the database, a summary must be generated for building ad-hoc reports on the website. An easy way to know if the application is processing data is to look at the count of the raw reports and the count of the processed report summaries and compare the two. If those two values keep increasing, the application is processing reports.

Since our data is stored in a MySQL database, this is a pretty easy query:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), COUNT(*) FROM test_report; -- raw reports
SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), COUNT(*) FROM cpanstats; -- processed reports

If those queries are run every 5 minutes and the results stored in a time series database, I will have a record of how much data is processed over time. With this data, I can set a monitoring system to alert me when the amount of data processed drops to 0 for too long (which likely means that something is broken).

There are other metrics like this that provide insight into the CPAN Testers application. Since I started using Minion as a job queue, I have needed to know that Minion is running jobs and completing them successfully. This data is also easy to get from the MySQL database:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), COUNT(*) FROM minion_jobs; -- total jobs
SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), COUNT(*) FROM minion_jobs WHERE state="inactive"; -- pending jobs
SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), COUNT(*) FROM minion_jobs WHERE state="finished"; -- finished jobs
SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), COUNT(*) FROM minion_jobs WHERE state="failed"; -- failed jobs

Going to various places in your application and counting things is a very common kind of data to store in a time series. So common, that I was surprised when I couldn't find a tool that could easily do it. Then I remembered that I had written a good tool to read from SQL databases: ysql, part of ETL::Yertl.

Using the --count option, I could easily count the number of records in a table:

# SELECT COUNT(*) FROM test_report
$ ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count test_report
---
value: 3450981

# SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cpanstats
$ ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count cpanstats
---
value: 83671432

The --count option also allows the --where option to limit the count to rows that match the given SQL WHERE clause. So I can get counts of the total number of Minion jobs, the pending jobs, the finished jobs, and the failed jobs:

ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs --where 'state="inactive"'
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs --where 'state="finished"'
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs --where 'state="failed"'

All I needed is a tool to write to time series databases. With ETL::Yertl v0.35, I've added the yts command. This command can read/write time series values in YAML documents, like this:

---
metric: cpantesters.report_count
timestamp: 2017-01-01T00:00:00
value: 83081421
---
metric: cpantesters.report_count
timestamp: 2017-01-01T00:10:00
value: 83081485
---
metric: cpantesters.report_count
timestamp: 2017-01-01T00:20:00
value: 83081539

We can also easily write single metric values by giving the metric to write on the command line. If we don't specify a timestamp, it will default to now:

$ yts influxdb://localhost telegraf.cpantesters.report_count <<
---
value: 83081421

So to write my metrics, I just need to combine the ysql command and the yts command using shell pipes:

ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count test_report         | yts influxdb://localhost telegraf.cpantesters.report_count
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count cpanstats         | yts influxdb://localhost telegraf.cpantesters.stats_count
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs         | yts influxdb://localhost telegraf.minion.total_jobs
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs --where 'state="inactive"'         | yts influxdb://localhost telegraf.minion.pending_jobs
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs --where 'state="finished"'         | yts influxdb://localhost telegraf.minion.finished_jobs
ysql --dsn dbi:mysql:localhost --count minion_jobs --where 'state="failed"'         | yts influxdb://localhost telegraf.minion.failed_jobs

Now I can run these as cron jobs to poll the status of the CPAN Testers application and send myself an alert (configured with Grafana when something looks wrong!

Right now, yts supports both InfluxDB (used by CPAN Testers) and Graphite (used by many). If you need support for another time series database, submit a patch for your adapter! If you're using a SQL database as time series storage, submit a patch for that!