Monitoring StatsD with MetricFire

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.

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.

MetricFire offers users a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of popular open-source monitoring software services: Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and Kubernetes. You get all these within a hosted environment as a single product. Not only does MetricFire fit well into the infrastructure monitoring use-case, such as network monitoring and server monitoring, but we also do application monitoring and business intelligence.

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.

The benefits of MetricFire are:

• 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. 
    

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. 

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.

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.