Riemann is a network monitoring system written in Clojure, it offers a rather simple protobuf-based API. I have just tagged Katja version 0.1, my Riemann client written in Erlang.

Katja supports all the basic things a Riemann client has to support. It can …

  • … send events
  • … send states
  • … query events

Additionally multiple events and states can also be send in a single message.

Katja only supports Erlang/OTP R16B01+. This is mostly because in releases before R16 query was an unused keyword, meaning that you could not easily use it as a function name or record field.

Sending Events⌗ 

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Event = [{service, "katja demo"}, {metric, 9000.1}],
ok = katja:send_event(Event),
Event2 = [{service, <<"katja demo">>}, {metric, 9000.1}, {tags, ["demo"]}],
ok = katja:send_events([Event, Event2]).

Katja allows you to send either a single event or multiple ones. Events are simple property lists with the following (possible) keys: time, state, service, host, description, tags, ttl, attributes, metric.

The entire katja:event() type definition can be found on GitHub.

Sending States⌗ 

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State = [{service, "katja demo"}, {state, "testing"}],
ok = katja:send_state(State),
State2 = [{service, "katja demo"}, {state, "testing"}, {tags, ["demo"]}],
ok = katja:send_states([State, State2]).

States and events are very similar, so much so that the (possible) keys of a state property list are almost identical to the keys of an event property list: time, state, service, host, description, tags, ttl, once.

Once again, the entire katja:state() type definition can be found on GitHub.

Querying Events⌗ 

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{ok, Events} = katja:query("service = \"katja demo\"").

katja:query/1 will return a list of events. Events are a property list of type katja:event(), so what you send to Riemann is also what you get back when querying. There is one important thing to keep in mind: All undefined or [] values will be removed from the returned property list(s).

You can find example queries in the Riemann test suite.

Sending Entities⌗ 

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Event = [{service, "katja demo"}, {metric, 9000.1}],
State = [{service, "katja demo"}, {state, "testing"}],
ok = katja:send_entities([{events, [Event]}, {states, [State]}]).

Katja also allows you to send mutiple events and/or states in a single request via katja:send_entities/1.

Future⌗

There are two things I’m currently thinking about adding to Katja:

  1. Adding (generic) support process pools: This should be done in a way that does not assume anything about the pool that’s being used. Katja will not depend on a specific process pool implementation.

  2. Querying based on a property list: This means that you could pass a property list of type katja:event() to a query method and get back events based on that. In general, all it should take to do this is transforming the property list in a query string that Riemann understands.