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Monitoring StatsD with MetricFire

Monitoring StatsD with MetricFire for Better Visibility

To integrate StatsD and MetricFire, please reach out to MetricFire. Book a demo with the MetricFire team to discuss integrating StatsD and MetricFire, and see how that benefits your monitoring system.

What is MetricFire?

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. We enable you to use Hosted Graphite and aesthetic custom dashboards to visualize your metrics so you can understand what is happening.

 

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MetricFire offers a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of open-source Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and more. Not only does MetricFire fit well into many monitoring use cases, such as server monitoring, but we also offer application and cloud infrastructure monitoring.

         

Through this hosted environment, MetricFire boosts the unique features of open-source projects to give you more functionality than the original products. Below are some of the MetricFire features at a glance: 

  • Cloud Monitoring

  • Hosted Graphite

  • Dashboards


The key thing to remember is that Hosted Graphite by MetricFire is more than just Graphite. Our Hosted Graphite product actually adds data dimensionality and better data storage.

       

Benefits of Using MetricFire:

  • Simple, low-cost pricing
    A structured pricing model based on unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allow you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric.


  • Easy-to-use dashboards
    Easily share your dashboards with clients for free.


  • Responsive alerting
    Alert notification integrations PagerDuty, Slack, email, and webhooks.


  • Freedom of customization
    Custom metrics through your code.


  • Fantastic customer support
    Highly available support is provided by engineers for engineers to get you set up quickly.


  • Enterprise-ready
    Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment. 
      

What is StatsD?

StatsD is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers. StatsD sends this information over UDP or TCP from your server or network to your monitoring server. In most cases, your StatsD will send aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

StatsD is considered a “collector” in the monitoring world. It’s key job is to find and pull the metrics from your systems, and then push them to a monitoring server. However, it doesn’t store, aggregate, visualize or alert on any of your metrics. StatsD is intended for only one use-case: collecting. 

It listens for statistics such as counters and timers sent via UDP, performs aggregation of this data, and then sends it on to a configurable backend service - such as Hosted Graphite. You can use StatsD to perform such aggregation before sending your metrics to us by following this short guide.
Install StatsD by following the installation instructions.
Once installed, StatsD can then be used with a config file like this:
{
    port: 8125,
    flushInterval: 10000,
    graphitePort: 2003,
    graphiteHost: "carbon.hostedgraphite.com",
    graphite: {
         legacyNamespace: false,
         globalPrefix: "your-api-key-here"
      }

The key benefit of using StatsD is the customizability. Unlike standard Agents, you can tailor StatsD to do exactly what you want. You can map out hundreds of metrics, give the metrics customized names, and have them sent into your monitoring backend. 

Typically, StatsD pairs with Graphite as the monitoring backend. The primary reason for this is that Graphite does not come with its own collector. 

However, StatsD is also often used to pull metrics in unique or challenging cases, when something like a typical monitoring agent, or Prometheus’ built-in metrics scraping tool isn’t able to collect what you’re looking for. For example, StatsD is often used for monitoring Python web apps with Prometheus.

StatsD can be used to pull metrics from every part of the service that is running, and enables this data to be easily summed to get a clear picture of what your data is doing.

StatsD is also used to combine metrics from multiple sources into one location, such as pulling Graphite metrics into Prometheus. 

At MetricFire, you can integrate with StatsD using MetricFire’s StatsD Add-on. You can automatically pull your StatsD metrics into our monitoring platform, and see your StatsD metrics alongside your AWS and Graphite monitoring.

How to Integrate StatsD and MetricFire to Improve Your Monitoring System

To integrate StatsD and MetricFire with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate StatsD and MetricFire, and get StatsD interacting with your MetricFire dashboards in minutes.

The author for this testimonial, Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com.
“As MetricFire scales effortlessly, we can push and store more metrics than we really need today but might need tomorrow. This increases our depth of understanding of the systems that we run and heads off any future problems.”
Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com.

Don't just take our word for it

Why thousands of engineers choose us:

fingerprint icon Own your data
dollar icon Major savings
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Vendor lock-in's not our thing. We’re believers in you still owning your data, so you can request a full export at any time. That means you get all the benefits of an open-source tool, but with the security and stability of a SaaS tool.

“We now have over ten times the amount of metrics we started with, and on different accounts. One of the great things about MetricFire is that scaling to support this increase has been hassle-free, requiring no additional work on our side.”

Maxime Audet, Cloud-Ops Team Lead, Coveo

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Save valuable engineering time and stick within your budget. We're known for our predictable and transparent pricing so it's easy to keeps costs under control.

“Building and managing an on-premise installation at this scale would require a lot of engineer time, especially in the first year...we use this engineering time to work on initiatives closer to our core business”

Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com

Read customer story Customer photo of Jim

Transparency is at the root of how we operate: from pricing to postmortems we're open about how we do things. We even publish our internal system metrics to our public status page.

“There’s complete transparency with everything MetricFire do which means we can accurately predict what we’ll be spending and comfortably keep within our budget.”

Itai Yaffe, Big Data Developer, Nielsen

Read customer story Customer photo of Itai

Our first line, technical support comes from engineers, for engineers. So you get highly detailed, expert support when you need it.

"Every time I have a question, I get an answer from support after just a couple of hours. Their technical knowledge is excellent.”

Shahar Kobrinsky, VP of Architecture and Scale, Eyeview

Read customer story Customer photo of Shahar

Questions?

Don’t see the integration you’re looking for? Need help setting up your monitoring? Get in touch and one of our engineers will help you out.

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