enable special character support in Graphite metric name

Problem

Graphite doesn’t support special characters like “ “ (empty space), “/” slash etc. Because it expect everything to be just ASCII to split/processing them, and then make directories based on metric name.

For example:

  Metric:     datacenter1.server1.app1.metric1.abc

Will create datacenter1/server1/app1/metric1/abc.wsp

But Metric: datacentter1.this is a test/with/path.app.test will fail when create directory

So any special name not allow to appear in directory/file name is not supported by Graphite.

 

What we can do?

  We can urlEncode the metric name which has special characters. So like “/var/opt” (not valid file name) will become “%2Fvar%2Fopt”(now valid), using urlEncode instead of others (like BASE64) is because this will keep most of data readable.

 

So what to change?

1. urlEncode metric name before send to Graphite (if you always sending metrics using text/line mode instead of pickle/batch mode, then you may consider modify Carbon-cache.py), like

    metricname=quote(metricname, “*?[{”)

2. Change display code in Graphite web to correctly display metric name

     a. On left side, in navigation panel

    b. On graph legend

 

Code change.

1. In GRAPHITE_HOME/ webapp/graphite/metrics, edit file views.py   < ---- this one is responsible for navigation tree

a. Find below lines in function tree_json   
'text' : str(node.name)
Change to
'text' : unquote(str(node.name))

b. Add below line at the beginning of the file if not exists already
from urllib import unquote

2. In GRAPHITE_HOME/webapp/graphite/render, edit file glyph.py   < ------ this one is used to draw graph

a. Find below line in function drawGraph (def drawGraph(self,**params):)
elements = [ (series.name,series.color,series.options.get('secondYAxis'))  .....
change to
elements = [ (unquote(series.name),series.color,series.options.get('secondYAxis'))  ….

b. Add below line at the beginning of the file if not exists already
from urllib import unquote

3. You’re done

Screenshot to give you a little big confidence: