Hosted StatsD
StatsD is a simple server daemon that collects data from your systems.
It happily collects as much data as you want to send it, aggregates it into a few different views, and intermittently flushes it out to your backend service - in this case Hosted Graphite. When you want to create a new metric, you just send it on and StatsD creates it.
Why use StatsD
Let’s take the example that you have a very busy site sending data every time a user does something interesting. If your site activity were to grow linearly, so would the data sent to your measurement system - and soon you might end up in a situation where you’re overwhelming it. One of the useful things StatsD can do is to sample data; by sending only a percentage of the requests you get a lot fewer data points sent while still capturing an accurate view of the system.
Enabling Hosted StatsD
Our Hosted StatsD service is available for all plans, and is used by a variety of customers big and small. We regularly update it with the latest fixes and features from the open-source project. Note that the default flush interval for our Hosted StatsD is 10s.
Configuring StatsD Metrics
Hosted Graphite supports filtering the raw metrics your Hosted StatsD instance produces for some of its metric types such as counters and timers. This allows you to choose only the metric views you actually use, which reduces the metric usage count for your payment plan.
To enable/disable the specific metric views you want us to store, click the Filters button on the ‘StatsD’ section of the add-ons page.
Here you will see a list of StatsD metric types and their corresponding metric views. Checking/unchecking these views will enable/disable them respectively.
Hosted Graphite also allows users to configure StatsD settings for deleteGauges, deleteTimers, deleteSets, and deleteCounters. StatsD will send a value of 0 for a metric it hasn’t received any data unless these settings have been activated. deleteGauges will stop sending values for inactive gauges, deleteTimers will stop sending values for inactive timers, and so on.
These are enabled by default, and we recommend they remain activated to prevent stale metrics from persisting in your account. For example, if you have metric expiry set, metrics that are being persisted by the normal StatsD behavior will not expire.
To enable/disable the specific config values, click the Config button on the ‘StatsD’ section of the add-ons page. Here you will see a list of StatsD config options. Checking/unchecking these options will enable/disable them respectively. Click Save to save your changes.
Sending A StatsD Metric
Using the netcat utility:
Note that the metric name will prefixed with the type of metric (timers, gauges, counters) when it is processed by our system. For example: counters.foo.bar or gauges.bar.foo.
timers “<api-key>metric.name:<value>|ms”
gauges “<api-key>metric.name:<value>|g”
counters “<api-key>metric.name:<value>|c”
Sending a Tagged StatsD Metric
You can add tags to your StatsD metric using the following format:
You can then locate these metrics in the Tag Search section of our UI.
Pro Tip - to visualize tagged metrics on a dashboard, you must wrap the metric with the seriesByTag() Graphite function:
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