Graphite is an open-source monitoring tool for storing and viewing time series data. It does not collect data, but has a simple interface and integrates easily with third-party tools. Grafana allows you to connect to a Graphite installation (or other data source) and build dashboards to view and analyze the data.

What is Graphite vs Grafana?

Grafana is a powerful platform for monitoring and time-series data analysis. Graphite is a system for data collection and visualization. Graphite is strong in time-series metrics collection, but Grafana provides a more advanced solution for data analysis and visualization.

What is Graphite API?

Graphite-API is an alternative to Graphite-web, without any built-in dashboard. Its role is solely to fetch metrics from a time-series database (whisper, cyanite, etc.) and rendering graphs or JSON data out of these time series. It is meant to be consumed by any of the numerous Graphite dashboard applications.