Collectd is software to collect data about the software and hardware running on your computers. It also has various options for storage backends. Currently I use the carbon/graphite combination as storage and presentation front-end for collectd.

Redis is a data storage backend, that is really fast since the data is stored in memory and only persisted to disk as necessary or required. Redis provides some basic data structures and functions to query and manipulate the structures. This makes it more flexible than memcached, while being similarly quick.

The FreeBSD port of collectd 5.x doesn't include an option ...

So after listening to too many "DevOps" podcasts, I decided to get off my ass and do some things. One of those things was wanting to play around with graphite. Graphite is a django-based front-end for the whisper/carbon monitoring data storage system. I noticed that all three had found their way in to the FreeBSD ports tree. You can find them at web/py-graphite-web, databases/py-carbon, and databases/py-whisper.

I've collected a bit of historical data with collectd and had been using the php-based Collectd Graph Panel as the front-end. This had familiarized me with collectd's system ...