Introduction

pystatsd is a client and server implementation of Etsy's brilliant statsd server, a front end/proxy for the Graphite stats collection and graphing server.

• Graphite
  • http://graphite.wikidot.com
• Statsd
  • code: https://github.com/etsy/statsd
  • blog post: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

Usage

See statsd_test for sample usage:

from pystatsd import Client, Server

srvr = Server(debug=True)
srvr.serve()

sc = Client('example.org', 8125)

sc.timing('python_test.time', 500)
sc.increment('python_test.inc_int')
sc.decrement('python_test.decr_int')
sc.gauge('python_test.amount', 42)

Building a Debian Package

To build a debian package, run dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Upstart init Script

Upstart is the daemon management system for Ubuntu, and it's really great!

A basic upstart script has been included for the pystatsd server. It's located under init/, and will be installed to /usr/share/doc if you build/install a .deb file. The upstart script should be copied to /etc/init/pystatsd.conf and will read configuration variables from /etc/default/pystatsd. By default, the pystatsd daemon runs as user 'nobody' which is a good thing from a security perspective.

Troubleshooting

You can see the raw values received by pystatsd by packet sniffing:

$ sudo ngrep -qd any . udp dst port 8125

You can see the raw values dispatched to carbon by packet sniffing:

$ sudo ngrep -qd any stats tcp dst port 2003