This is a very nice article. One nitpick- You don't need to use statsd as an intermediary in order for your application to send metrics via UDP; just set ENABL

This is a very nice article. One nitpick- You don't need to use statsd as an intermediary in order for your application to send metrics via UDP; just set ENABLE_UDP_LISTENER to True in carbon.conf and graphite will accept metrics on UDP itself. Other options are TCP(obviously) and AMQP. I love how simple Graphite's plaintext protocol is; it's nothing more than a line of text with <metric path> <metric value> <metric timestamp>. This has lead lots of software to integrate graphite support and makes it easy to do yourself. In a pinch I've even set up a cronjob reading a value from /proc and sending it to graphite via netcat. Graphite shines at generating graphs, but it's ability to return JSON is also very useful. For example, I've written a script (https://github.com/sciurus/grallect https://github.com/sciurus/grallect) that plugs into Nagios and generates alerts based on system metrics sent by Collectd to Graphite. My two frustrations with graphite- You have to choose a single aggregation method. I'd like to be able to store the average, minimum, and maximum values. Sometimes I find it hard to query for the data I want. E.G. To check the percentage of space used on each filesystem I have to fetch example.com.df-.df_complex-used and example.com.df-.df_complex-free separately and calculate the percentages myself because asPercent(example.df-*.df_complex-{used,free}) would combine all the filesystems.