Part 1 of the DevOPS series: Lets have a look at statsd
Of all of the new tools spawned by the DevOps movement, I find Etsy’s open-source tool, statsd, the most interesting. The enterprise software market is being shaken to its foundation, and statsd is one of the tools providing the vibrations. Instead of relying on the more generic metrics provided by application performance management (APM) vendors, Etsy, and others like them, is delivering highly specific, and highly relevant metrics directly from their code with statsd.
In less than 3 years since it was first introduced, StatsD has emerged as one of the most popular – and useful – parts of the modern Devops toolchain. Here’s why…
What is StatsD exactly?
StatsD is originally a simple daemon developed and released by Etsy to aggregate and summarize application metrics. With StatsD, applications are to be instrumented by developers using language-specific client libraries. These libraries will then communicate with the StatsD daemon using its dead-simple protocol, and the daemon will then generate aggregate metrics and relay them to virtually any graphing or monitoring backend.
The rest, as they say, is history. StatsD quickly grew in popularity, to a point where it really became a unifying protocol for application metrics collection – of which the Etsy Daemon was only a reference implementation.
StatsD clients are available for both windows and Linux servers.
