The Sick Muse project was started to provide a simple alternative to the graphs generated by RRDTool. While there are a number of great alternative dashboards for the Graphite project, there aren’t very many which work directly on top of Collectd’s round-robin database files.
The primary goal of this project is ease of use. Sick Muse should be easy to install and run, easy to navigate, and easy to customize. Sick Muse should be performant enough for large projects but simple enough for small projects. While not all of these goals have been met they are the primary drivers for features planned in the future.
On the server side, Sick Muse makes use of the Tornado web server because it provides great performance with a small resource footprint. It provides a complete solution for the needs of this project (url routing, template rendering, static resources) including the possibily of future real-time data via websockets.
On the client side, this project uses Backbone to query the API and maintain state on the client. The graphs are generated using the Flot library which has a well designed base API as well as a strong set of plugins for additional functionality.
The styles are based on Twitter Bootstrap. This gives sane default styles, including a responsive layout, along with easy customization using LESS.