statsd/statsd

A network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Key Concepts
buckets

Each stat is in its own “bucket”. They are not predefined anywhere. Buckets can be named anything that will translate to Graphite (periods make folders, etc)

values

Each stat will have a value. How it is interpreted depends on modifiers. In general values should be integers.

flush

After the flush interval timeout (defined by config.flushInterval, default 10 seconds), stats are aggregated and sent to an upstream backend service.

Installation and Configuration
Docker
StatsD supports docker in two ways:

The official docker image on docker hub
Building the image from the bundled Dockerfile
Manual installation
Install Node.js (All Current and LTS Node.js versions are supported.)
Clone the project
Create a config file from exampleConfig.js and put it somewhere
Start the Daemon: node stats.js /path/to/config
Usage
The basic line protocol expects metrics to be sent in the format:

:|
So the simplest way to send in metrics from your command line if you have StatsD running with the default UDP server on localhost would be:

echo “foo:1|c” | nc -u -w0 127.0.0.1 8125
More Specific Topics
Metric Types
Graphite Integration
Supported Servers
Supported Backends
Admin TCP Interface
Server Interface
Backend Interface
Metric Namespacing
StatsD Cluster Proxy
Debugging
There are additional config variables available for debugging:

debug - log exceptions and print out more diagnostic info
dumpMessages - print debug info on incoming messages
For more information, check the exampleConfig.js.

Tests
A test framework has been added using node-unit and some custom code to start and manipulate StatsD. Please add tests under test/ for any new features or bug fixes encountered. Testing a live server can be tricky, attempts were made to eliminate race conditions but it may be possible to encounter a stuck state. If doing dev work, a killall statsd will kill any stray test servers in the background (don’t do this on a production machine!).

Tests can be executed with ./run_tests.sh.

History
StatsD was originally written at Etsy and released with a blog post about how it works and why we created it.

Inspiration
StatsD was inspired (heavily) by the project of the same name at Flickr. Here’s a post where Cal Henderson described it in depth: Counting and timing. Cal re-released the code recently: Perl StatsD