# Welcome to Hosted Graphite ### Contents * [Graphite](#graphite) * [Hosted Graphite](#hosted-graphite) * [Why You Should Use Hosted Graphite](#why-you-should-use-hosted-graphite) * [A Simple Example](#a-simple-example) * [Simple but Powerful](#simple-but-powerful) {% embed url="" %} ### [Graphite](#graphite) [Graphite](https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) is an open-source graphing system for time-series data. It features a storage backend (Whisper), a query language with built-in functions for data manipulation, and a basic web interface for visualizations. Metrics sent to Graphite's **carbon endpoint** are timestamped, stored, can be graphed, and it is a well-documented and user-friendly tool for monitoring and analyzing time-series data. ### [Hosted Graphite](#hosted-graphite)

Hosted Graphite by [MetricFire](https://www.metricfire.com/) has improved upon standard Graphite and offers additional tools and features that provide our customers with a robust and well-rounded monitoring solution. * We handle the **aggregation**, **storage**, and **backups** of your data. We have built-in features like [Data Views](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/additional-features/data-views) and [Aggregation Rules](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/additional-features/aggregation-rules), and offer a list of [API's](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/api-guides) for programatic management of your monitoring environment. * Send [server metrics](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/agents-guide) from your running instances, [custom metrics](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/language-guide) from within your application code, and [integration metrics](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/add-ons-and-integrations-guide) from other popular services that we integrate with, like Heroku, AWS, Azure, and GCP. * Visualize your data in meaningful ways with customizable [dashboards](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/dashboard-and-graphs/primary-dashboards) that look awesome! * Configure [alerts](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/alerting-guide) to your metrics and integrate with popular [notification channels](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/alerting-guide/notification-channels-api) such as Email, Slack, Pager Duty, Microsoft Teams, OpsGenie, or custom Webhooks. * We have fast and friendly [support](mailto:support%40hostedgraphite.com) and are dedicated to making sure you get the highest possible value from our services. #### [Why You Should Use Hosted Graphite](#why-you-should-use-hosted-graphite) * Hosted Graphite takes away the burden of self-hosting your own monitoring solution, allowing you more time and freedom to work on your most important tasks. You can measure, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data from your applications and infrastructure without the hassles of setting up your own servers, worrying about scaling, storing data, alerting, or maintenance. * You need a monitoring solution in order to make data-driven decisions for your business. Get an instant overview of how your technology stack is performing by monitoring your systems and observing trends in your data. If you're serious about your application, you need to be serious about your monitoring too. * Hosted Graphite eliminates common challenges of self-hosted Graphite monitoring, like aggregation, scaling, long-term storage, and query timeouts. Designed for large datasets, our optimized database efficiently handles high-cardinality data structures for faster and more reliable performance. * Hosted Graphite has many supported APIs, integrations, plugins, and features that can help you get data in and configure visualizations/alerts in a way that is most useful for you. Anytime you have questions about our product and services, our knowledgeable support team will respond quickly and give you useful advice. ### [A Simple Example](#a-simple-example) A common monitoring target is the number of concurrent users in a web application. A possible solution is to have a scheduled background task, which once a minute queries the appropriate resource and sends us a metric with the current number of users. Each time we receive a message to a metric namespace (like conc\_users), we store the associated numeric values with a [UNIX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time) timestamp. When you create a new [dashboard](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/dashboard-and-graphs/primary-dashboards), you can start graphing the metric with just a few clicks:

#### [Simple but Powerful](#simple-but-powerful) Although it lets you get up and running quickly with simple graphs, our [Hosted Dashboards](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/dashboard-and-graphs/primary-dashboards) are a very powerful tool. You can build complex graphs from multiple metrics, use [Graphite functions](https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/functions.html) to manipulate the metric data, and have the ability to fine tune the styling and functionality of the graphs. Here’s another example: this time three metrics are being graphed simultaneously, and some styling has been applied to improve clarity. Check out the [graph panel reference](http://docs.grafana.org/features/panels/graph/) to see some of the many available possibilities.

Next, you can see our [Getting Started](https://docs.hostedgraphite.com/getting-started) guide to learn how to send data to your Hosted Graphite account, and use that data to build **custom** **dashboards** and **alerts**. If you don't already have a Hosted Graphite account, you can start a 14 day free trial [here](https://www.hostedgraphite.com/accounts/signup/). You can also schedule a product demo [here](https://www.metricfire.com/demo/https://www.metricfire.com/demo/), to speak with a knowledgable member of our team that will offer support and advice on how to get up and running quickly.