Excuse the blatant advertising (I contracted with these guys), but Librato Metrics is intended to work like 'Graphite as SaaS' so you don't have to go through this crazy process. They also subscribe to the thought that your metrics should be separate from your production infrastructure -- otherwise when your servers melt your graphing server melts too :). Obviously if you want to stay pure open source then this won't apply, but otherwise it's a pretty neat service. https://metrics.librato.com/ and https://github.com/librato