Graphite has a good interface and a lot of graph options but no real data. collectd gathers a lot of data but has no real interface. Luckily, we can combine the two, thanks to a collectd module named write_graphite.

In order to feed the collectd data into Graphite, we simply need to modify two configuration files on the monitoring server and restart collectd. After we do this, we can enable more collectd modules, add more PostgreSQL queries, and so on. All the collectd data will be transmitted to Graphite until we break the connection.

This is powerful functionality, as we will demonstrate.