Graphite consists of a storage backend and a web-based visualization frontend. Client applications send streams of numeric time-series data to the Graphite backend (called carbon), where it gets stored in fixed-size database files similar in design to RRD.

Graphite-API is an alternative to Graphite-web, without any built-in dashboard. Its role is solely to fetch metrics from a time-series database and rendering graphs or JSON data out of these time series. It is meant to be consumed by any of the numerous Graphite dashboard applications.