The graphite plugin allows measurements to be saved using the graphite line protocol. By default, enabling the graphite plugin will allow you to collect metrics and store them using the metric name as the measurement. If you send a metric named `servers.localhost.cpu.loadavg.10`, it will store the full metric name as the measurement with no extracted tags.
While this default setup works, it is not the ideal way to store measurements in InfluxDB since it does not take advantage of tags. It also will not perform optimally with a large dataset sizes since queries will be forced to use regexes which is known to not scale well.
To extract tags from metrics, one or more templates must be configured to parse metrics into tags and measurements.
Templates allow matching parts of a metric name to be used as tag names in the stored metric. They have a similar format to graphite metric names. The values in between the separators are used as the tag name. The location of the tag name that matches the same position as the graphite metric section is used as the value. If there is no value, the graphite portion is skipped.
The special value _measurement_ is used to define the measurement name. It can have a trailing `*` to indicate that the remainder of the metric should be used. If a _measurement_ is not specified, the full metric name is used.
Additional tags can be added to a metric that don't exist on the received metric. You can add additional tags by specifying them after the pattern. Tags have the same format as the line protocol. Multiple tags are separated by commas.
One template may not match all metrics. For example, using multiple plugins with diamond will produce metrics in different formats. If you need to use multiple templates, you'll need to define a prefix filter that must match before the template can be applied.
Filters have a similar format to templates but work more like wildcard expressions. When multiple filters would match a metric, the more specific one is chosen. Filters are configured by adding them before the template.
For example,
```
servers.localhost.cpu.loadavg.10
servers.host123.elasticsearch.cache_hits 100
servers.host456.mysql.tx_count 10
```
*`servers.*` would match all values
*`servers.*.mysql` would match `servers.host456.mysql.tx_count 10`
*`servers.localhost.*` would match `servers.localhost.cpu.loadavg`
## Default Templates
If no template filters are defined or you want to just have one basic template, you can define a default template. This template will apply to any metric that has not already matched a filter.
