i work on scada systems which usually come with a time series database built in so that operators can do some basic plotting. Often these products have a 10 or 15 year legacy.

The scada vendors seem to be careful to avoid making the time series database and plotting tools which come with the HMI packages too powerful, as this might cut in to their sales of Historian type products.

If it wasn't a commodity already, the rash of startups which all seem to write their own tools for storing and plotting metrics from the operations of their servers and software services has certainly made the guts of a capable historian readily available for free.

for storing data open tsdb, based on hbase+hadoop, http://opentsdb.net/ kairosdb, based on cassandra, https://code.google.com/p/kairosdb/ timeseriesframework http://timeseriesframework.codeplex.com/

for plotting data I am hoping to find a library that allows for real time plotting and zooming, scrolling with the mouse wheel. so far I have found openhistorian http://openhistorian.codeplex.com/ kst http://sourceforge.net/projects/kst/ veusz http://home.gna.org/veusz/ chaco http://docs.enthought.com/chaco/ guiqwt https://code.google.com/p/guiqwt/ pyqtgraph http://www.pyqtgraph.org/ lots of D3 based libraries: http://selection.datavisualization.ch/

so there are lots of tools out there if you've got the patience to figure out which one is right for your application and glue it together