Graphite is a great tool for quickly seeing what is going on. Generating the graphs was always a bit of a pain point for it. I must say, this is an amazing contribution. Thanks so much.<p>(I'm the author of <a href="http://jmxtrans.googlecode.com" rel="nofollow">http://jmxtrans.googlecode.com</a> which allows you to very easily tie together Graphite & Java Management Extensions (JMX) for monitoring all of your JVM's.)
Another alternative is to consider a service that handles storage/visualization/alerting/etc for your time-series data.
I work for a startup that does exactly that and there are other options in this space as well. Would love any feedback you guys might have: <a href="https://metrics.librato.com" rel="nofollow">https://metrics.librato.com</a>
As this post recognizes, there are a lot of components bundled under the name Graphite:<p>* There's whisper, the file format carbon uses to store time-series data.<p>* There's carbon, the daemons that accept data over the network, combines them, and writes them to whisper files.<p>* There's graphite, a django application that can read data from carbon files or RRD files. Graphite features several user interfaces of its own as well as an API to render the data as graphs or as numerical values.<p>What I find most interesting is graphite's API's potential as an intermediary service between your metrics storage (whether its RRD, whisper, or some other format that you add support for) and your applications that need to consume those metrics (e.g. your monitoring system, your dashboards).
I've been working on a less-configurable sort of graphite dashboard for use as an ambient display- <a href="https://github.com/potch/statsdash" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/potch/statsdash</a>. Looks great on a tablet.