This is not entirely on topic, but I'm still blown away from the UDP approach the other day. Send a UDP packet to your log collector and forget about it. It's lightning fast, the recipient can drop packets if it can't handle the load and your program will never be any the wiser.
Last year our upstream provider broke TCP (they upgraded a router/firewall box and it wasn't supposed to affect us, but it dropped asymetrically routed TCP traffic) but UDP packets still got out, and thanks to seeing UDP syslog traffic making it out helped us diagnose the issue. Using the "more reliable TCP method" (rsyslogd supports this) would have made the issue harder to track down.
Syslog is more about human-readable logging, but you're right, it's more relevant in this context. The graphite approach was about fast aggregation of samples (app response times, load, etc) and the graphing of these.
