Ooooohhh a hard one. I better get an upvote for this (joking)!

So WRT installation, it is a PITA to install graphite as it follows an antipattern of hardcoding /opt into setup.cfg, which we'll be changing in the 0.10 release (to making installing via normal python tools like virtualenv and pip work). That being said, there are really 3 main components to graphite:

1. Whisper, the "improved" RRD.
2. Carbon, the relay and caching daemon that writes out metrics (as whisper by default)
3. Graphite, which is simply a webui for reading data from carbon and creating graphs, or returning JSON.

The only part that is actually interesting is Graphite, whereas carbon and whisper can be though more of as implementation details for when Chris Davis first wrote graphite. There is a large collection of tools that work with carbon's super simple text based line protocol. Additionally, there are tons of tools that work with the json or png graph data that graphite-web returns. As an ecosystem, we've made it so that swapping out for a different backend is trivial.

"""
Also, I can see logging dictionaries being much more efficient and
useful than logging single values -- with graphite if you want to
track page hits per section of your site (of which you have 10) per
user (100) per browser (5), you end up with 5000 individual metrics,
and you need to have thought of them in advance. With influxdb you
can log {"section": "front page", "user": "bob", "browser":
"firefox", "hits": 1} as a single metric and then use an SQL-like
query to filter by section / user / browser (or any combination of
those) as and when you want to."[2]
"""

This is precisely what statsd is for, if you're not familar with it, you really should look into it.

Now regarding "influx vs graphite", I honestly don't see influx as a competitor nor will I likely ever see it as a competitor. Sure you can do some aggregations and apply some functions to your data stored in influx, awesome, but Influx can be used as a backend for graphite[1]. So many people don't realize that writing a pluggable backend for graphite is pretty simple. For super scalable backends, I'm somewhat partial to the Cyanite[2] backend which stores metrics in Cassandra, but other people swear by opentsdb + graphite[3].

One thing I will say is that the carbon relay is not great software. Around 100k metrics per second even tuned on excellent hardware, twisted (python) falls over and it just eats it. I've been meaning to take a shot at rewriting this in golang, but don't have tons and tons of free time to do this on just yet. For a faster relay/aggregator, may I point you to the c version[4] which is super performant.

Now for anyone who says that whisper is inefficient because it does tiny writes, perhaps they should understand the software they are attempting to use before deploying it. Whisper is more or less RRD, but allowing backfilling old data. Lots and lots of tiny writes are how the software it replaced worked and how it is meant to work. That being said, there have been several pull requests to batch the writes so that where possible, it has less of an IO penalty. However, you fundamentally need to understand how to troubleshoot a Linux system and tune a system / hardware for the application running on it. I can't stress that enough.

Regarding other choices, I think quite highly of a drop in graphite-web compatible rewrite in flask named graphite-api[5] from one of our excellent contributors who works for exoscale. Graphite api is interesting in that it is basically just the good parts of graphite-web, namely the functions.py that do all of the transformations. For a dashboard with that, I also suggest you look into grafana[6], which also supports influxdb natively, but again, graphite has a ton more options for transforming the data so they are overlapping, but not competitors.

Also please note that unlike Influx or many of the "competitors" of graphite, we're a small handful of developers spread out over 2-3 continents who don't have a ton of free time. We work on Graphite for fun and try to make things better for the community. There are plenty of good tools != to graphite to use, this is a good thing! #monitoringlove

Does this answer most of your questions?

[1] https://github.com/vimeo/graphite-influxdb

[2] https://github.com/brutasse/graphite-cyanite and https://github.com/pyr/cyanite

[3] https://github.com/mikebryant/graphite-opentsdb-finder

[4] https://github.com/grobian/carbon-c-relay

[5] https://github.com/brutasse/graphite-api

[6] http://grafana.org/