UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I apologize if this has been posted before but I have been doing a lot of searching and I have not found any real answers, this is quite possibly due to that I may not be searching for the right terms or something. Little bit of info about my situation is that I'm a newbie as you probably guessed already and I am running a Debian server as a game server.

What I am trying to do is store the valueble statistical data related to the game for later analysis to help improve/optimize/diagnose. This means that I need to store data over long periods of time for example the number of users online or the number of active game rooms that are active. Then with the data that is stored I would like to be able to pull up daily/weekly/monthly/yearly charts through web/apache or something but I need visual charts. This data that is to be stored is only available on the Debian server side and is in no way available to any of the clients. This data will also only ever be viewed by me or possibly anyone who is part of the project.

I am well aware of the fact that I can just store the data myself into mysql with timestamps and other related data and then use a php type of chart creating 3rd party app or create my own charts through php/apache. But I don't want to do this because it creates more work for me and that is what I'm trying to avoid because working on the game project alone is more than enough work for me.

So what I am asking is that if someone can point me in the right direction of any 3rd party app that does this that I can look into or possibly other solutions that I am unaware of that would suite these needs. I would appreciate any info on this.

Given what you are looking to do, a future proof solution will indeed involve a webserver, php scripting, a database (sqlite would be a good choice, since it is shipped with the more recent versions of php) and a graphing library (jpgraph is good choice here).
If you first want to experiment with what exactly you want to visualise, then google charts would come to mind, particularly because it can be done client side.