Graphing statistics over time in Ruby

Question

In my Rails application there are some metrics about the content of the database I made available in an administration interface (number of users, number of users with actual data, rate of usage, numbers of database records in various tables). I can get this information at any point in time, but I want to log and graph historical data so I can see trends. I know this problem has been solved a million times before (New Relic and Facebook's Developer Insights being two places I see it daily).

What's the easiest way to approach this in Rails? This is just for my personal curiosity; external services and ugly UIs are okay as long as they're not too difficult to implement.

Answer 1

For the graphing part Google Charts has been pretty useful to me in the past. There's a decent API for it too http://github.com/mattetti/googlecharts