title: How to connect Java to Grafana
body: <p>I really like the capabilities of Grafana for graphing metrics over time and showing a nice dashboard.  I'd like to use it to track CPU, Mem, etc throughout my deployment environment.  I'd also like to use it to track some numbers from my Java programs.  How can I connect Java to Grafana?</p>
  
  <p>Grafana supports three different database solutions (graphite, influxdb, OpenTSDB).  I am not using any of these at the moment.  But influxdb looks easy to setup.  I'm really just looking for something simple and future-proof.  It will only monitor a few servers for now, but it may grow in time.  Is there an easy way to push a single Java integer with a label and timestamp into Grafana.  I'm thinking there must be something like log4j for metrics.  But I also need to decide which database to use, but hopefully that would be abstracted out of the interface.  Any advice?</p>