Logging to Graphite monitoring tool from java

We use Graphite as a tool for monitoring some stats and watch trends. A requirement is to monitor impact of new releases as build is deployed to app nodes to see if things like
1) Has the memcache usage increased.
2) Has the no of Java exceptions went up.
3) Is the app using more tomcat threads.
Here is a screenshot

We changed the installer to log a deploy event when a new build is deployed. I wrote a simple spring bean to log graphite events using java. Logging to graphite is easy, all you need to do is open a socket and send lines of events.

import org.slf4j.Logger;

import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory; 

import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import java.io.Writer;
import java.net.Socket;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;


public class GraphiteLogger {
private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GraphiteLogger.class);
 private String graphiteHost;

 private int graphitePort;

 public String getGraphiteHost() {
  return graphiteHost;
 }

 public void setGraphiteHost(String graphiteHost) {
  this.graphiteHost = graphiteHost;
 }

 public int getGraphitePort() {
  return graphitePort;
 }

 public void setGraphitePort(int graphitePort) {
  this.graphitePort = graphitePort;
 }

 public void logToGraphite(String key, long value) {
  Map stats = new HashMap();
  stats.put(key, value);
  logToGraphite(stats);
 }
 
 public void logToGraphite(Map stats) {
  if (stats.isEmpty()) {
   return;
  }

  try {
   String nodeIdentifier = java.net.InetAddress.getLocalHost().getHostName();
   logToGraphite(nodeIdentifier, stats);
  } catch (Throwable t) {
   logger.warn("Can't log to graphite", t);
  }
 }

 private void logToGraphite(String nodeIdentifier, Map stats) throws Exception {
  Long curTimeInSec = System.currentTimeMillis() / 1000;
  StringBuffer lines = new StringBuffer();
  for (Map.Entry entry : stats.entrySet()) {
   String key = nodeIdentifier + "." + entry.getKey();
   lines.append(key).append(" ").append(entry.getValue()).append(" ").append(curTimeInSec).append("\n"); //even the last line in graphite 
  }
  logToGraphite(lines);
 }

 private void logToGraphite(StringBuffer lines) throws Exception {
  String msg = lines.toString();
  logger.info("Writing [{}] to graphite", msg);
  Socket socket = new Socket(graphiteHost, graphitePort);
  try {
   Writer writer = new OutputStreamWriter(socket.getOutputStream());
   writer.write(msg);
   writer.flush();
   writer.close();
  } finally {
   socket.close();
  }
 }

 public static void main(String[]args) throws Exception {
  String host = args[0];
  int port = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);
  String nodeIdentifier ="tomcat.UI.planck_8080";
  Map stats = new HashMap();
  stats.put("memcache_calls", 900L);
  stats.put("num_threads", 50L);
  GraphiteLogger graphiteLogger = new GraphiteLogger();
  graphiteLogger.setGraphiteHost(host);
  graphiteLogger.setGraphitePort(port);
  graphiteLogger.logToGraphite(nodeIdentifier, stats);
 }
}