This blog post helped me when I took a look last year: http://geek.michaelgrace.org/2011/09/installing-statsd-on-ub...
Graphite consists of these three parts:
carbon - a daemon that listens for time-series data. whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data. webapp - a (Django) webapp that renders graphs on demand.
And statsd is its own daemon.
That means 3 daemons needs to run to make stat aggregating.
I am very wary about introducing new software into our stack, if I doesn't understand it. Bad configured software could cause problems down the road.
Last time I tried out a recipe that installed Redis, it didn't version lock the Redis-server which meant that the daemon couldn't start because they had deprecated some configs.
The recent DDOS DNS attacks was possible because people have setup wrongly configured DNS servers.