Graphite is salvation from the metrics systems of old, which demanded m4 macros, XML data definitons, and the blood of your first born. Graphite only requires an initial retention config and accepts plaintext. Getting data back out again is also a breeze: after building up graphs in the built-in composer, you can get the take the graph image URL and add &format=json to get the plot points in json.
I needed a Graphite instance for personal projects and I’ve been on a kick of containerizing everything, I built a Dockerfil for Graphite 0.9.2 via nginx/uwsgi in a container. The source is available at GitHub: drags/docker-graphite. Docker index: drags/graphite¹
Check out the README for setup instructions. Open an issue for discussion.
¹: This is just a personal build of Graphite in Docker and does not support clustering. Check out other images on the Docker registry for some excellently maintained containers.