0.9.9

10/6/11

Graphite 0.9.9 is now out and available for download. It available through PyPI (http://pypi.python.org/pypi) and the Launchpad project page (https://launchpad.net/graphite).

This is a very substantial release. To give you an idea, the 0.9.8 release was cut from trunk around revision 380 while 0.9.9 was cut from revision 589, so that’s almost as many commits as Graphite has ever had just since 0.9.8. The full changelog is too big for me to assemble nicely unfortunately, but I will try to cover all the important bits and if you’re really curious you can see all the changes at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~graphite-dev/graphite/main/changes

There are some really important things you need to know if you’re upgrading from an earlier release (even trunk). Read all the change summaries below please!

API Changes

There have been API changes in whisper, carbon, and the webapp. If you are upgrading to 0.9.9 YOU MUST UPGRADE ALL 3 PACKAGES, if you mix 0.9.8 whisper with 0.9.9 carbon for example, it won’t work. Upgrade all 3, and don’t forget to use the –force.

The webapp has a new dependency on django.tagging (you should be able to simply ‘pip install django-tagging’)

New Default Behavior

We’ve addressed a security vulnerability with receiving pickled datapoints, see Bug #817247. This affects you in that the new default behavior is to use a more secure unpickler, which is slightly slower than the standard insecure unpickler. To revert to the less secure but faster approach previously used, you have to set USE_INSECURE_UNPICKLER=True in your carbon.conf.

Revamped Dashboard UI

  • You can now use all the composer functionality by clicking on a dashboard graph
  • You can drag and drop to move graphs around (and hover-drop to combine them!)
  • There is an awesome new auto-completer interface available by going to the Dashboard menu, Configure UI, Completer. This may become the default in the future because its so awesome. (pro tip: try using the dashboard completer with * instead of * for some really powerful ‘group by’ functionality)

Other Stuff

  • Tons of readthedocs.org improvements, also the example config files now have some great comment documentation
  • Whisper now supports rollup aggregation methods other than averaging. The default is still to average but there a new aggregation-schemas.conf (see Bug #853955)
  • To learn about the new metric metadata API that can be used to configure custom rollup aggregation methods read my answer to https://answers.launchpad.net/graphite/+question/173304 (you can skip the question part if you just care about the new API)

As for the current development focus, I can now finally work on the long-awaited merge of the 1.1 branch into trunk. The Ceres database will be in the next release, I’m going to try and merge it in (including the new refactored storage API) in the next week or so. I’ll announce on graphite-dev when its available for testing. My aim is to get it fully documented for 1.0, which I’m targetting for end of this year. There might be an 0.9.10 first, depending on how many bugs are found in 0.9.9.

As always, thanks to everyone who has contributed, especially the following rockstar crew that made some major contributions in the past few months:

  • Aman Gupta (tmm1)
  • Nick Leskiw (nleskiw)
  • Sidnei da Silva

- ChrisMD