Monitoring StatsD with Graphite APIs

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

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.

Graphite-API is a tool designed to fetch metrics from time series databases such as Whisper or Cyanite. Once it has gathered the metrics, it then renders graphs or JSON data out of each of these time series. Graphite-API is an API-based alternative to Graphite-web, so it does not have any built-in dashboard. Instead, this AP server tool replicates Graphite-web behavior, and works with the abundant Graphite dashboard applications available on the market such as Grafana.

The Graphite-API application comes with several improvements over Graphite-web:

• The Graphite-API application is entirely stateless and doesn't require a SQL database to function.
• It supports both Python 2 and 3.
• The HTTP API accepts JSON data and allows the formation of data and query string parameters.
• The application is straightforward for the user to install and configure.
• Graphite-API architecture is simpler, almost minimalistic, and it has fewer moving parts than Graphite-web.
• It comes with a plugin architecture for integrating with time series databases or for adding more analysis functions.
• The API codebase has a stronger focus on test coverage and code quality.

Graphite API does not come with any web or graphical interfaces. This feature gap is where MetricFire comes into its own.

With our Hosted Graphite solution, we've taken the best parts of open-source Graphite and supercharged them. We also added everything missing in Graphite: a built-in agent, team accounts, granular dashboard permissions, and integrations with other technologies and services like AWS, Heroku, logging tools, and more. Hosted Graphite's advanced filtering lets you choose only the data views you want to see, so you can discard the rest. You can also set up simple rules to discard data you no longer keep, plus receive alerts via email or the Slack messaging platform.

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

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.