statskell is a daemon that collects statistics and propagates them to a proper db. It came to be after reading Measure anything, measure everything article. The purpose is to have a simple interface for counting 'stuff'. For example you can record failed and successful login attempts of your site. If there is a weird spike in the failed login attempts, you can probably assume that there has been some sort of hacking attempt. Another use-case is for example calculating how many emails you receive within a timeperiod. I have a fetchmail/procmail setup, and I can increase the counter from within procmail when any email arrive, statskell then flushes the received counter to rrdtool.
statskell works by receiving udp messages, aggregating them and then flushing them out after a 10 second period. It flushes the aggregated stats into a http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ database. I chose rrdtool as the backend because it handles graphing and its database is constant size. If you want to read more about it, go to [http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/](rrdtool website).
statskell is in alpha-stage, but it should be stable enough. All you need to is
to create the rrdtool
database and start the
server. It listens on port 4242 udp packets and writes the results into
stats.rrd file into the directory where the server has been started.
The protocol is a simple 4 column protocol separated by pipe character ('|').
bucket_name|value|type|consolidation
Possible values for the type field:
absoluteAbsolute value. See rrdtool documentation for what it meansgaugeGauged value. See rrdtool documentation for what it means
Possible values for the consolidation field:
sumSum together all the values. For example if you get results faster then the flush-delay, the values are added togethermaxSelect the maximum of all the valuesminSelect the minimum of all the valuesaverageCalculate the average of all the values
Thank you for my employer dmgazelle.com for allowing me to use my time on this project.