StatsD

A simple protocol and daemon to aggregate and summarize application metrics

• applications have a client (language specific library) that communicate with the StatsD daemon, which generates metrics and relays them to a monitoring backend
• the StatsD client library sends individual calls to the StatsD server over a UDP datagram (UDP, no acknoledgement, no library blocking when submitting data)
  • doesn't buffer data between calls to the server, so less complexity
• the StatsD daemon listens to UDP traffic from all applcation libraries and aggregates data over time, and flushing it to the data backend on defined intervals
• the monitoring backend turns metrics into usable charts and alerts (Datadog)
• StatsD offers more simplicity over other methods, by decoupling the application from its instrumentation (StatsD won't crash your app)