StatsD Integration

StatsD is a popular network daemon used for monitoring applications. This integration uses the Telegraf StatsD service plugin that supports point tags. Telegraf is a light-weight server process capable of collecting, processing, aggregating, and sending metrics to a Wavefront proxy.

This is a custom integration that supports sending custom metrics directly from your application code via a TCP or UDP socket. Using these metrics you can create your own dashboards.

To see a list of the metrics for this integration, select the integration from https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/master/plugins/inputs.

StatsD Setup

Step 1. Install Telegraf

If you’ve already installed Wavefront Telegraf packages on a host, and want to run StatsD on the same host, skip to Step 2. Otherwise, install Telegraf using these steps:

Log in to your product instance and follow the instructions on the Setup tab to install Telegraf and a Wavefront proxy in your environment. If a proxy is already running in your environment, you can select that proxy and the Telegraf install command connects with that proxy. Sign up for a free trial to check it out!

Step 2. Configure the StatsD Service Plugin

1. Create a file called statsd.conf in /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d and enter the following snippet:

[[inputs.statsd]]
  service_address = ":8125"
  delete_gauges = false
  delete_counters = false
  delete_sets = false
  delete_timings = true
  percentiles = [90]
  metric_separator = "_"
  allowed_pending_messages = 10000
  percentile_limit = 1000

Step 3. Restart Telegraf

Run sudo service telegraf restart to restart your agent.

Step 4. Send Test Metrics

The easiest and quickest way to send test metrics to StatsD is to use netcat:

$ echo "foo.bar.test1:+1|g" | nc -u localhost 8125

This command creates and increments a gauge named foo.bar.test1. After running this command open a chart and enter the query ts(“foo.bar.test1”). Run the command a few more times and you should see the line increase in value as the gauge is incremented.

Set Point Tags on Metrics

The Telegraf StatsD plugin has built-in support for point tags. Add any tags you want applied to the end of the metric name:

$ echo "foo.bar.test2,tag1=val1:+1|g" | nc -u localhost 8125

This command creates and increment a gauge named foo.bar.test2 with a tag named tag1 with value val1. You can add multiple tags to your metrics (separated by commas).

Override the Metric Source

By default, Telegraf uses the hostname of the machine running StatsD as the source of the metric. If you have remote applications sending metrics into your StatsD service, you may want to override the source with the hostname of your application. To do this, pass the hostname point tag to StatsD with the name of the host running your application.

$ echo "foo.bar.test3,hostname=mycustomsource:+1|g" | nc -u localhost 8125

This command creates and increment a new gauge, but has a different source (mycustomsource) from the previous examples.

For reference information about the Telegraf StatsD service plugin, see Telegraf Service Plugin: statsd.