That's what Grafana [0][1] is for -- i.e. creating nicer displays for Graphite.
However it's single host, doesn't scale
It may take some effort, but it can be done, and much of the heavy-lifting seems to have been done and been made available as open-source.
Here's a blog post from Jan. 2017 [2] from a gambling site about scaling Graphite.
And here's a talk [3] from Vladimir Smirnov at Booking.com from Feb. 2017 about scaling Graphite -- their solution is open-source (links in the talk and slides available at the link):
This is our story of the challenges we’ve faced at Booking.com and how we made our Graphite system handle millions of metrics per second.
(And this [4] is an older, but more comprehensive, look at various approaches to scaling Graphite from the Wikimedia people with the pros and cons listed).
[1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana
[2] http://engineering.skybettingandgaming.com/2017/01/13/graphi...
[3] https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/graphite_at_scale/
It can be done but at what costs? Better get a tool that gets the job done out of the box and does it well.
For starters, if you're operating in the cloud, you cannot get servers with FusionIO drives and top notch SSD. That limits your ability to scale vertically.
Similarly, basic infrastructure health is not giving you the same sort of information (what the software is actually doing) that logging does. In order to do time-series monitoring of your software rather than your system, you need to spend time thinking about what metrics you need to track and how you're going to obtain them.
I run both an ELK stack and a Prometheus stack, and I find they're good for different things.
Since you mention Papertrail specifically in the context of costs - Papertrail is actually a bit pricey relative to the competition. For example, compare https://papertrailapp.com/plans to https://sematext.com/logsene/#plans-and-pricing . I think Sematext Logsene is 2-3 times cheaper than Papertrail.
Lastly, I was at a Cloud Native Conference in Berlin last week. A lot of people have the same setup as you - ELK for logs + Prometheus for metrics. We're running Sematext Cloud where we ship both our metrics and our logs, so we can easily switch between metrics and logs much more easily, correlate, and troubleshoot faster. Seems a bit simpler than ELK+Prometheus...
Sumologic, papertrail, logentries (and many more) for cloud logs. Graylog or ELK or Splunk for self hosted logs.
However, logs should never be send to the cloud, they are too sensitive information to outsource. Server metrics + stats are more reasonable.
Agree, stats and logs cover different things. Need both.
Saying that logs should never be sent to the cloud is overly absolute. Some logs should indeed stay behind firewall, but lots of organizations have logs that can be shipped out to services whose features derive all kinds of interesting insights from logs.
A monitoring system has a lower barrier to entry.
http://datadoghq.com/ => will do ALL of that and much more. You can deploy it in a few hours to thousands of hosts, no problem.
Direct competitor: http://signalfx.com/
Have no money to pay for high quality tool? graphite + statsd will do the trick for basic infrastructure. However it's single host, doesn't scale and only basic ugly graphs are supported.