StatsD Clients

This is a collection of clients for both Etsy-standard StatsD and AppFirst-extended StatsD

StatsD was popularized by Etsy, and we refer to their implementation as "Etsy-standard". It's a light-weight method of gathering statistics from your applications. As an application developer, all you need to do is include a small library, and sprinkle one-liners like this throughout your code:

Statsd.increment("my.important.event")
Statsd.gauge("my.important.value", important_value)
Statsd.timing("my.important.process", important_process_time)

In the Etsy version, this will cause a UDP packet to be sent to a designated server that is running their collection and visualization packages. The AppFirst client API looks the same to the application developer, but sends data via POSIX message queue or Windows Mailslot to the collector and takes advantage of AppFirst collection and visualization technologies.

You are probably already running an AppFirst collector on your server. All you need to do is use an AppFirst StatsD library instead of an Etsy-only library. This library will aggregate your metrics, and then use a message queue to pass them to the AppFirst collector, which will pass them up to our Big Data store, where they will be visible on your AppFirst dashboards and Correlate charts. This is more efficient than the UDP method and you don't need to set up the Etsy collection and visualization environment.

If you are already using Etsy StatsD, you can make a gradual transition. Our libraries can be used in Etsy mode, so you can configure them to send UDP to your existing Etsy monitoring apparatus. Our collector also accepts StatsD UDP messages, so you can just point your existing Etsy-only StatsD library to localhost:8125, until you are ready to transition to an AppFirst StatsD library. Click here for more info on enabling UDP StatsD on the collector.

We provide more details on how to use our StatsD libraries in the README file found under each language.