Grafana vs. Hosted Graphite vs. RRDtool

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Hosted Graphite is the powerful open-source application metrics system used by hundreds of companies. We take away the headaches of scaling, maintenance, and upgrades and let you do what you do best - write great software.

RRDtool lets you log and analyze the data you gather from all kinds of data-sources (DS). The data analysis part of RRDtool is based on the ability to quickly generate graphical representations of the data values collected over a definable time period.