A really simple TCP management interface is available by default on port 8126 or overriden in the configuration file. Inspired by the memcache stats approach this can be used to monitor a live statsd server. You can interact with the management server by telnetting to port 8126, the following commands are available:
- stats - some stats about the running server
- counters - a dump of all the current counters
- gauges - a dump of all the current gauges
- timers - a dump of the current timers
The stats output currently will give you:
- uptime: the number of seconds elapsed since statsd started
- messages.last_msg_seen: the number of elapsed seconds since statsd received a message
- messages.bad_lines_seen: the number of bad lines seen since startup
Each backend will also publish a set of statistics, prefixed by its module name.
You can use this to delete buckets no longer in use. For example, if you were hosting statsd at 10.10.10.10:
#to delete counter sandbox.test.temporary
echo "delcounters sandbox.test.temporary" | nc 10.10.10.10 8126
Graphite:
- graphite.last_flush: the number of seconds elapsed since the last successful flush to graphite
- graphite.last_exception: the number of seconds elapsed since the last exception thrown whilst flushing to graphite
- graphite.flush_length: the length of the string sent to graphite
- graphite.flush_time: the time it took to send the data to graphite
Those statistics will also be sent to graphite under the namespaces
stats.statsd.graphiteStats.last_exception and
stats.statsd.graphiteStats.last_flush.
A simple nagios check can be found in the utils/ directory that can be used to check metric thresholds, for example the number of seconds since the last successful flush to graphite.