In my quest to figure out how to tune Graphite, it became very quickly apparent that a good source explaining what each Carbon Cache metric stands for in the cache reporting was lacking. I found this particular source, which I’m detailing below for reference:

Explanation (Somewhat)

Quoted from referenced article under “Contributions”:

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cache.queries - the number of queries made against “the cache”.

cache.queues - the number of queues in the cache, which logically corresponds to the number of distinct metrics that have datapoints waiting to be written.

cache.size - the sum total of the sizes of all the queues (the number of datapoints in “the cache”).

metricsReceived - the number of (metric, datapoint) pairs received by carbon.

cpuUsage - carbon’s own measurement of its user + system cpu time.

creates - the number of new metrics (new wsp files) created each minute, this is typically 0.

errors - a quantitative measurement of bad joo-joo.

updateOperations - as the writer thread iterates all the queues in the cache, it takes a queue and writes all of its datapoints to a wsp file in a single update operation. This measures the number of update operations occurring each minute. Note that some updates may be a single datapoint while others may involve many datapoints, depending on how much data is in the queues.

pointsPerUpdate - the average number of datapoints written in each update during the minute.

avgUpdateTime - the average time each update operation takes. In my youthful stupidity I chose to measure this in seconds, thus the values are typically extremely small… Likely to change to microseconds in the future.

committedPoints - the total number of datapoints written each minute. Generally this should be equal to updateOperations times pointsPerUpdate.

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Credit

Contributions to some of the above were gleaned from: