Monitoring with Graphite

http://www.infoq.com/articles/graphite-intro
Graphite is composed of multiple back-end and front-end components. The back-end components are used to store numeric time-series data. The front-end components are used to retrieve the metric data and optionally render graphs.

Metrics can be published to a load balancer or directly to a Carbon process. The Carbon process interacts with the Whisper database library to store the time-series data to the filesystem.

/opt/graphite/:

pip install https://github.com/graphite-project/ceres/tarball/master
pip install whisper
pip install carbon
pip install graphite-web

Virtualenv provides an isolated Python environment to run Graphite in.
/opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/local_settings.py

http://www.infoq.com/articles/graphite-intro

http://www.aosabook.org/en/graphite.html
Graphite performs two pretty simple tasks: storing numbers that change over time and graphing them. 
What makes Graphite unique is that it provides this functionality as a network service that is both easy to use and highly scalable.

One of the most common uses of Graphite is building web-based dashboards for monitoring and analysis