Graphite is an interesting project. If you wish to take a look at the project a bit deeper. The official Graphite Documentation is very comprehensive.

But some pointers could be useful.

Point 1: What is Graphite?

Graphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system. As a user, you write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite’s processing backend, carbon, which stores the data in Graphite’s specialized database. The data can then be visualized through graphite’s web interfaces.

Graphite 1.2.0 Documentation

Point 2: Architecture

Graphite consists of 3 software components:

1. carbon – a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data
2. whisper – a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD)
3. graphite webapp – A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo

Point 3: Who should be using Graphite?

Anybody who would want to track values of anything over time. If you have a number that could potentially change over time, and you might want to represent the value over time on a graph, then Graphite can probably meet your needs.

Specifically, Graphite is designed to handle numeric time-series data. For example, Graphite would be good at graphing stock prices because they are numbers that change over time. Whether it’s a few data points, or dozens of performance metrics from thousands of servers, then Graphite is for you. As a bonus, you don’t necessarily know the names of those things in advance (who wants to maintain such huge configuration?); you simply send a metric name, a timestamp, and a value, and Graphite takes care of the rest!

Graphite 1.2.0 Documentation

Point 4: Tools

Ganglia, a tool used by many High Performing Cluster (HPC) worldwide can be integrated with Graphite. Other tools that work with Graphite can be found here

Point 5: Get the book…..