Graphite is a very simple time-series graphing solution that does one thing very well. Setting it up is easy and feeding it data is even easier. It's basically a little server which builds RRD instances on the fly and allows you to generate images of graphs using URLs. For example, you can feed it all kinds of data from your web server, in real time, and have it produce an graph as a PNG.

I guess for me the best part is the simplicity of the whole thing. Getting data in is just a simple TCP or UDP socket call (which you can do with almost anything, from nc to curl). Getting graphs out is a URL (albit a bit complex to create by hand :). Tying it all together is a simple, but functional, web interface.

Graphine solves the problem of graph generation and building dashboards in Graphite. By default Graphite builds PNG graphs which are expensive to build on the server and aren't dynamic. Graphine coverts these static PNG files to SVG and lets the browser do all the heavy lifting with regards to rendering.