Supporting different metrics backends

[aalpern]

Thoughts have been running through my head occasionally on how to support more metrics backends than just Graphite (i.e. InfluxDB), so this is a spot for preliminary thoughts and discussion.

With querying for data mostly isolated to the ds.models.data.Query class, creating infrastructure for handling different kinds of queries and transforming them to a common data format should make it fairly straightforward.

[obfuscurity]

Funny, I was looking through the code this morning wondering the exact same thing (except for Librato). 😉

It looks like there's a lot of duplicated stuff throughout, e.g. graphite url refs. Would be nice if things were a bit more normalized first but I know that's a lot of work.

[aalpern]

Yeah - the javascript code in particular is a bit of a hot mess, but gradually moving towards sanity. This is my first big JS project :). A few more bug fixes and bits of packaging/polishing work and I'll be ready to call it 1.0 - then the next big push will be to clean things up.

[aalpern]

Minor update - I'm currently investigating adding support for multiple backends by way of a gateway that can multiplex queries to different backends (looking at graphite, influxdb, prometheus, and opentsdb initially) and return results in a common format.

So, rather than browser -> graphite, we get browser -> time series gateway -> [graphite/influx/etc...], and would gain the ability to include data from multiple backends in a single dashboard with minimal impact on the frontend code.