What I really like about Graphite is the fact that you can push data to it, instead of using a poller, like Cacti for example. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to install and configure Graphite on Ubuntu Server:

Graphite requires: python2.4 or greater pycairo (with PNG backend support) mod_python django python-ldap (optional - needed for ldap-based webapp authentication) python-memcached (optional - needed for webapp caching, big performance boost) python-sqlite2 (optional - a django-supported database module is required) bitmap and bitmap-fonts required on some systems, notably Red Hat

Graphite is highly scalable real-time graphing system. It is seen as a replacement for more traditional graphing systems such as cacti and munin. To install graphite, first you will need to enable the EPEL repository first. Once enabled pull in the required RPMS. # yum install graphite-web graphite-web-selinux mysql mysql-server MySQL-python

This is effectively the missing connector between speaking to a JVM via JMX on one end and whatever logging / monitoring / graphing package that you can dream up on the other end. jmxtrans is very powerful tool which uses easily generated JSON (or YAML) based configuration files and then outputs the data in whatever format you desire. It does this with a very efficient engine design that will scale to communicating with thousands of machines from a single jmxtrans instance. The core engine is very solid and there are writers for Graphite, StatsD, Ganglia, cacti/rrdtool, OpenTSDB, text files, and stdout.