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.
Who should use Graphite?
Graphite is actually a bit of a niche application. Specifically, it 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. However Graphite is a complex system, and if you only have a few hundred distinct things you want to graph (stocks prices in the S&P 500) then Graphite is probably overkill. But if you need to graph a lot of different things (like dozens of performance metrics from thousands of servers) and you don't necessarily know the names of those things in advance (who wants to maintain such huge configuration?) then Graphite is for you.
