With the release of the 1.1.x series, Graphite now supports tagged metrics.
Rather than using the traditional dotted hierarchy, metrics can be stored and retrieved based on tags - for example:
host=webserver-
or
region=us-east-1
So where before you might have a name like myapp.webserver-0001.us-east-1.responses.500, you could instead have myapp.responses;host=webserver-0001;region=us-east-1;code=500