[rrd-users] RRD daemon?

[Jeremy Dunck]

I'm a newbie to rrdtool, having gone through a couple tutorials, but
no production use yet.

I have perhaps an unusual use case-- I'm not even certain rrdtool is
right for the job.

I'm tech lead on a web site, and we have a need for internal metrics--
these are things like lifetime pageviews per user, or per piece of
content, or form abandonment rate per form version, and so on.

rrdtool is obviously in wide use for sys-admin metrics, but I get the
feeling it's generally used for a relatively small number of distinct
kinds of metrics, possibly with a large number of each of those types
of metrics.  Is this perception wrong?

In any case, rrdtool's assumption that it's working with a file is a
bit awkward for my use case-- I have multiple web nodes, and the app
code doesn't implement SNMP or anything like that, so it's not
straightforward to query counters from the app code.

I was thinking it might be useful to make a daemon which provides an
API allowing on-the-fly definition of new RRDBs from a defined
template, and this daemon would also provide an API to manage counters
in memcached; the daemon would then periodically update the associated
RRDBs with those counters.

Does something like this exist?  If not, why not?  I feel like it must
be a common use case, but I probably don't know what I'm doing.

Thanks for any advice.