Python - Graphite: Storage and Visualization of Time-series Data

I'm doing some work with Graphite in Python. Here is a quick overview of what Graphite is...

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Graphite provides real-time visualization and storage of numeric time-series data.

Links:

• Project: https://launchpad.net/graphite
• Docs: http://graphite.readthedocs.org

Graphite does two things:

• Store numeric time-series data
• Render graphs of this data on demand

Graphite consists of a storage backend and a web-based visualization frontend. Client applications send streams of numeric time-series data to the Graphite backend (called carbon), where it gets stored in fixed-size database files similar in design to RRD. The web frontend provides 2 distinct user interfaces for visualizing this data in graphs as well as a simple URL-based API for direct graph generation.

Graphite consists of 3 software components:

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