About Graphite

The Graphite ecosystem provides a scalable platform for gathering and storing time-series data and a powerful suite of functions to query and analyze that data over time.

The easiest way to get started is with Grafana Cloud, our fully composable observability stack.

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Introduction to Graphite

An open source monitoring system first developed by Chris Davis at Orbitz in 2006, Graphite allows teams to track the performance of their websites, applications, business services, and networked servers. It marked the start of a new generation of monitoring tools, making it easier than ever to store, retrieve, share, and visualize time-series data.

Grafana Labs is proud to support the development of the Graphite project by employing Graphite maintainers, building first-class support for Graphite into Grafana, and ensuring Grafana customers receive Graphite support and features they need.

What’s the difference between Graphite and Prometheus?

Graphite

Graphite is a general-purpose time-series database originally designed by Chris Davis at Orbitz in 2006.

Hierarchical and tag-based data models support both traditional hierarchical metric naming schemes.

Function pipeline-based query language allows users to build complex queries by processing metrics through a large library of available functions to aggregate and summarize data.

Simple instrumentation via the Carbon line protocol makes it easy to start sending metrics with as little as one line of code.

Push-based metrics: Graphite has “push” semantics — the client is the one pushing the data into the backend.

Compatibility & Integrations: Due to the longevity and popularity of the project, there is a huge array of different tools, products, and projects that support sending metrics to Graphite, either directly or via pre-processing tools such as Stats

Prometheus

Prometheus is an open source toolkit that provides monitoring and alerting for services and applications running in containers.

Multidimensional data model enables time series to be identified by a metric name and a set of key-value pairs.

Powerful, concise query language broadly known as PromQL, allows slicing and dicing of collected time series data in order to generate ad-hoc graphs, tables, and alerts.

Simple operation via command-line flags and a configuration file. Each server is independent for reliability, relying only on local storage. Written in Go, all binaries are statically linked and easy to deploy.

Pull-based metrics Prometheus “pulls” the metrics directly from its clients so that metrics arrive to the backend by scraping.

Over 150 integrations The Prometheus community has integrations with virtually every database, storage system, operating system, monitoring system, and application server imaginable.

Why Grafana and Graphite?

Grafana seamlessly integrates with Graphite to collect Graphite metrics, offering you a powerful way to aggregate, visualize and extend the value of your Graphite data.

Centralized, horizontally scalable, replicated architecture enables you to easily manage and maintain your Graphite implementation based on your specific architecture.
With a fully assembled and configured monitoring stack out of the box, there’s no need to build systems from open source components.
Best-in-class query performance means you can quickly create real-time dashboards that can be shared throughout your organization.
Robust data-access policies enable administrators to secure and govern your metrics data.

Traditional tools

DIY style of scaling Graphite is complex and requires a lot of effort to maintain throughout different teams

Centralizing metrics, alerts, queries, and dashboards requires manual instrumentation and is challenging
Lacks data governance, resulting in all-or-nothing access to metrics
Requires Graphite experts to deploy and maintain

Grafana’s approach

Enables Graphite-as-a-Service

Easily view and share between teams across multiple teams
Centralized access control and authentication
Simple to operate and maintain

“Grafana and Graphite became the perfect solution for us and the whole company. We are able to provide precisely tailored dashboards for other departments and game teams.”

Felix Oechsler

Technical Director, Gameforge