Hosted Graphite

Hosted Graphite (HG) is the best thing for server monitoring since sliced bread. It doesn't replace services like New Relic, it augments them in a wonderful way. Graphite is a known entity in the space and does a great job storing your time-series data, and HG has done all the right things to make using and displaying Graphite data as painless as possible. I've been using HG for nearly a year now for displaying thousands of metrics, the product has been rock solid reliable, performance has been excellent and they've continued to add awesome features all the time.

I've been using Graphite for years. Originally we hosted Graphite in our data center, but more recently we switched to using Hosted Graphite. Drilling down into your metrics in Hosted Graphite can be daunting at first, but it becomes so simple to use once you understand it. There's a plethora of documentation provided by Hosted Graphite, and many third party applications that you can integrate with to get even more use from Hosted Graphite. You can create really useful dashboards of your most important systems, and the you can set the dashboard to auto-refresh. We keep Hosted Graphite up on displays dedicated to monitoring our systems.
We recently started using Hosted Graphite's alerts, but it's still in Beta. They're headed the right direction, and we're ultimately looking to get rid of our SolarWinds monitoring software in favor of Hosted Graphite.
The customer support is great. We've always seen quick resolution to our issues. They are extremely prompt, and they welcome feedback and suggestions. I can't say anything bad about their support.
Hosted Graphite is definitely a monitoring product that I'd recommend.

Graphite is a great platform for keeping metrics around how your software works. It's standard, there are plenty of clients for it, and it sticks to the mentality of doing one thing well. Having said that, it's a real pain to build and monitor. Whisper is a complex system to maintain, and it's very easy to make a setting which will have a lasting impact on your data in a way you don't want.

Luckily, Hosted Graphite handles this for you. They provide something that's wire-compatible with "normal" Graphite, but doesn't have the weaknesses of Whisper, and which you as a user don't have to deal with. I would easily spend more time each month making sure I have my own install running than I pay these guys for their service.

In terms of ease-of-use, their console is fine. Some bits are a bit complex and not where you'd think, but there's also not that much to configure. Graphite itself is a pretty complex format, and they don't do anything to simplify that - which is what I'd want. They add some extra "views" to take advantage of their infrastructure and those could be documented better, but they're mentioned in there in a few places.

Their service is friendly, and offers useful suggestions on how to make my queries better when I reach out to them.

If I'm a person who knows what Graphite is and is looking for someone to manage it for me, I'd definitely recommend this vendor.

Hosted Graphite saves us having to host an entire tier of our stack. We can install a simple StatsD listener on each machine and throw stats at Hosted Graphite all day long.

Add in hosted Graphana dashboards, sharable Graphana URLs, expiring statistics for use in auto-scaled/virtual environments like AWS and Rackspace, redundant storage, and near-zero-work configuration, and we save not only having to have institutional knowledge for hosting Graphite and Graphana (and their associated DB servers like ElastiCache) but almost the entire cost of doing so.

Using Hosted Graphite seemed like a no-brainer, and turns out it absolutely was. They recently added in integrations with AWS CloudWatch and Logentries, which made the service even more useful to us.

I can't recommend it enough, especially if you have a small ops team and setting up stats and graphing seems like a monumental task.

Most valuable thing about HG is their use of OSS. You don't need vendor agent to collect metrics, you just use statsd (but you can anything that can send to Graphite). They are using also Grafana dashboard (which is best dashboarding so far), so you can import/export pre-made dashboards.

The use of OSS means that you can easily migrate from/to HG, just change your statsd collector URL and that's it. You can also host Grafana or alternative dashboarding yourself, because you have access to their Graphite endpoint. They also offer help to migrate your historical data to their service.

In the era of virtualization, per host pricing model just does not work. In HG you pay per metric (packs) and the value/price is very good.

Their support is blazing fast and friendly.

There are a few downsides for me so far:
- there is no established alerting yet (currently in beta), however you can attach external altering that works with Graphite, you know, you have access to their Graphite endpoint.
- in the era of devops, limitation of team members does not work well, I prefer all of my team members to have access to the monitoring
- having example/pre-baked dashboards would be very very helpful

I evaluated at least 10 alternative services before choosing HG, they best matched my needs.