I was inspired by this post when I first read it a few month ago. Since then, I've used a modified version of StatsD to send data to an in house realtime graphing engine. A lot of our tools are php backends, so it was super convenient to be able to drop the class in and start measuring things.

For anyone interested, I used wrote node.js process takes arbitrary statsd-compliant data point and serves a socket.io enabled front-end for 'zero-config', realtime graphing.

We've found it useful internally for taking quick measurements on various projects. I was going to productize or open source the whole thing, but then life got in the way. Maybe it will see the light of day someday.