I did look at the greater landscape. What I found great about Graphite is the number of functions you have to massage the metrics. Not all metrics come in the same form (total number of bytes received since boot, or number of bytes received per second) and things like the `hitcount` and the `perSecond` (in the upcoming 0.10) functions really help.

It can indeed be slow, and this is usually a I/O issue. The Whisper storage backend does a lot of seeks, and people recommend using SSDs to deal with that. Also, you can have graphite-web just give you the (calculated) metric data for a particular query in JSON, and have it rendered client-side. http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tools.html lists a few.

Finally, we are investigating other storage backends for more fault tolerance. Probably we'll settle on something based on Cassandra, like http://blueflood.io/.