Self-hosted Graphite
Standing up your own Graphite stack seems straightforward. Whisper, Carbon, Grafana — get them running and you're monitoring. Then reality kicks in.
- Provision and secure your own servers
- Configure Whisper storage and retention
- Tune Carbon relay and aggregation rules
- Install, version, and manage Grafana
- Monitor the monitoring system itself
- Handle scaling as metric volume grows
- Scaling pain: Query timeouts, aggregation drift, and storage bloat compound as metric count grows — and Graphite doesn't scale gracefully.
- Single point of failure: If your monitoring VM goes down, you lose visibility exactly when you need it most.
- Ongoing maintenance: Version updates, security patches, and disk resizing are on you — forever.
We operate a distributed eventually-consistent database built upon open-source Riak. In case of failure, the workload is distributed and we store three redundant copies of all data at all aggregation resolutions. Queries will get back to the user with answers only when two different systems agree, which is also useful for fault tolerance. We also have backup, failover, and disaster recovery plans in place you never have to worry about data loss.