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).