Is it the case even with the latest Grafana (2.5) that you still get more functionality by running graphite-influxdb as a middleman?
I have Grafana 1.9 pointed directly at InfluxDB 0.8 and here's one thing you _can't_ do: group a series by X, then plot only the top Y groups. Is that the sort of thing that using graphite-influxdb provides?
There are a lot of things missing from Influx's query language. The most glaring issue is that you can't do 'multi step math' e.g. you can't do something like 'average series A and series B into 5min buckets then sum them'.
Try out Prometheus, you can get it up and running a few minutes. It supports all the functions Graphite does, bar sin() and the Holt Winters functions which we plan on adding.
For that reason we still use graphite's API, but not the UI or datastore. Whisper nor whatever the newer one is would survive the load we put on it.
Our setup looks like:
grafana -> graphite-api -> graphite-influxdb -> InfluxDB <- statsite (C impl of statsd) <- metrics