NAD can automatically configure itself with Circonus via a few command line options. When running in configuration mode, NAD will create a check and graphs with Circonus and then exit. It will not attempt to bind to any port, so is safe to use while running normally.
https://github.com/circonus-labs/nad#automatic-configuration-with-circonus
Your chef recipe will have an execute resource that runs NAD with the special self-config options to actually provision checks and graphs. It will then use a typical service resource to manage the ongoing NAD service.
The Chef NAD-cookbook can be found here https://github.com/circonus-labs/nad-cookbook and it will automate installing from the omnibus Linux packages that we publish.