Batsd [1] is a stripped down version of (StatsD + Graphite) that works well in my opinion. You won't have the full graphite functions etc, but it's easier to get started.

[1] https://github.com/noahhl/batsd

This blog post helped me when I took a look last year: http://geek.michaelgrace.org/2011/09/installing-statsd-on-ub...

It just too bad there is a lot of moving parts in this setup.

Graphite consists of these three parts:

carbon - a daemon that listens for time-series data. whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data. webapp - a (Django) webapp that renders graphs on demand.

And statsd is its own daemon.

That means 3 daemons needs to run to make stat aggregating.

Just use the existing chef recipies out there for setting it up. Why would you try to get all the moving parts integrated properly when the work has already been done? Stand on the shoulders of giants.

> when the work has already been done?

I am very wary about introducing new software into our stack, if I doesn't understand it. Bad configured software could cause problems down the road.

Last time I tried out a recipe that installed Redis, it didn't version lock the Redis-server which meant that the daemon couldn't start because they had deprecated some configs.

The recent DDOS DNS attacks was possible because people have setup wrongly configured DNS servers.