gateway

README

Gateway

The SignalFx Gateway lets you aggregate metrics and send them to SignalFx. It is a multilingual datapoint demultiplexer that can accept time series data from the carbon (Graphite), collectd or SignalFx protocols and emit those datapoints to a series of servers using the carbon, collectd or SignalFx protocols. We recommend placing the gateway either on the same server as another existing metrics aggregator or on a central server that is already receiving datapoints, such as Graphite's carbon database.

Usage and Configuration

Please refer to the usage and configuration documentation located here for more information on operating the SignalFx Gateway.

Development

If you want to submit patches for the gateway, make sure your code passes travis_check.sh with exit code 0. For help setting up your development environment, it should be enough to mirror the install steps of .travis.yml. You may need to make sure your GOPATH env variable is set correctly.

Code layout

You only need to read this if you want to develop the gateway or understand the gateway's code.

The gateway is divided into two main components: forwarder and listener. The forwarder and listener are glued together by the demultiplexer.

When a listener receives a datapoint, it converts the datapoint into a basic datapoint type. This core datapoint type is then sent to the multiplexer that will send a pointer to that datapoint to each forwarder.

Sometimes there is a loss of fidelity during transmission if a listener and forwarder don't support the same options. While it's impossible to make something understand an option it does not, we don't want to forget support for this option when we translate a datapoint through the multiplexer. We work around this by sometimes encoding the raw representation of the datapoint into the Datapoint object we forward. For example, points from carbon are not only translated into our core datapoint format, but also support ToCarbonLine which allows us to directly convert the abstract datapoint into what it looked like for carbon, which allows us to forward the point to another carbon database exactly as we received it.

All message passing between forwarders, multiplexer, and listeners happen on golang's built in channel abstraction.

Config file format

See the example config file for an example of how configuration looks. Configuration is a JSON file with two important fields: ListenFrom and ForwardTo.

License

The SignalFx Gateway is released under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for more details.