[grosskur]

Ryan Smith's "Building Metrics From Log Data" is an interesting talk about this:

http://vimeo.com/68183624

Also check out Heroku's Lumbermill project, which handles extracting router metrics on their platform:

https://github.com/heroku/lumbermill

If you're on AWS, CloudWatch is capable of ingesting log data and extracting metrics via pattern-matching:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/Developer...

When I used Graphite with Nagios, I bypassed all the Nagios data-collection and graphing features. Instead, I funneled all the data into Graphite and used check-graphite to alert on it:

https://github.com/pyr/check-graphite