Configure Graphite for StatsD
Did you configure Graphite for usage with StatsD? You must specify in Graphite configuration how you expect it to handle the data you are sending from StatsD. This is important because Graphite could be averaging your counts instead of summing them.
If sending sparse or "bursty" data
Confirm that your xFilesFactor is low enough that aggregation produces non null values even with a high rate of nulls. For example, 100 requests in the first 10 seconds, and none for the remaining 50 seconds in a minute would cause a storage of 100, null, null, null, null, null
which would be summed up to null when the data ages if the XFilesFactor is higher than 1/6. Using the statsd recommended graphite configuration handles this, but it is good to know about... as this can give the appearance of lost data.
Saving schema or aggregation changes
If you changed the graphite schema or aggregation settings after any metrics were stored (in whisper = graphite's storage) you'll need to either delete the .wsp files for the metric (graphite will recreate them) or run whisper-resize.py
.
Validating settings
You can verify the settings against some whisper data by running whisper-info.py on a .wsp file. Find the .wsp file for one of your metrics in /graphite/storage/whisper/
Run: whisper-info.py my_metric_data.wsp
. whisper-info.py output should tell you more about how the storage settings are working.
After you've confirmed that your data is accurate, then I'd move on to creating the graph you want in the UI:
You might need to use the hitcount() function for this.
This post covers what you are after pretty well (even if you aren't using StatsD).