Batsd: 37 Signals' Ruby Statsd implementation persisting to Redis

by uggedal • 14 years ago

69 28 14 years ago

What does "'wireline' compatibility" mean?

We don't use the same backend as Etsy's original implementation, but you should be able to take any script, etc. that emits statsd measurements for use with the original implementation and point it at Batsd. This means that the 50+ statsd clients that are out there, as well as lots of custom instrumentation, should "just work", even though it's stored and accessed in different ways after it's received.

scoot3• 14 years ago

So what can I use this for? It's not obvious from the docs on github, and I had a quick look at the doc for statsd as well and it doesn't shed much light either. (and shouldn't it be ratsd? :)

mattyb3• 14 years ago

The Etsy blog post that introduced StatsD is helpful:

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-meas...

noahnoahnoah5• 14 years ago

(I work for 37signals and wrote batsd)

This is really just one piece in a bigger set of things to track performance, usage, etc.

You can think of it as: Emitters --> Statsd (or in this case, Batsd) --> dashboards, alerts, etc.

We have emitters coming from Nginx, HAproxy, bluepill, postfix, etc. log files, a gem within all of our Rails apps, and a variety of other scripts that gather data. Those all point to batsd, which aggregates and stores them. We then extract the data into graphs on our dashboard, and use it extensively for Nagios alerting as well. There's a basic sample client included in this repository that we use for those purposes, though you're right, it just gets you raw numbers out of the box.

We're planning on releasing more of both the "emitters" that gather data, as well as a major part of our graphing/dashboard interface "soon".

And point well taken about making it more obvious how to get started and what you can use it for. I'll work on improving the documentation.

scoot3• 14 years ago

Thank you, that's very helpful. Looking forward to the emitters and dashboard whenever they're ready - I suspect they will help drive adoption of Batsd and encourage development of additional emitters.

julian372• 14 years ago

Could you explain briefly why you chose to write a replacement for statsd, rather than improve on it? What aspects of statsd were you not happy with?

(I don't have a horse in this race, I haven't used statsd before -- but I am planning to deploy some sort of statistics gathering soon and I wonder why I would choose your implementation over Etsy's, apart from the obvious appeal of the 37signals brand.)

caiusdurling• 14 years ago

YEAAAAAAAAH!

uggedal• 14 years ago

Those interested in lower memory consumption and efficiency should take a look at https://github.com/armon/statsite another statsd "clone". Originally a Python implementation statsite is now rewritten in C.

taligent• 14 years ago

I wouldn't exactly call that a clone since it doesn't support key features of statsd (e.g. gauges) and has unique features of its own (e.g. key/value pairs).

Looks brilliant otherwise.

DavidAbrams• 14 years ago

+1 for saying "key/value" instead of "key-value".

armon• 14 years ago

It is actually just a difference of naming. Gauges in statsd operate the same as kv data in statsite. Originally, both projects referred to them as kv, this seems to be a more recent change in statsd.

bri3d• 14 years ago

Similar, but backed by Graphite: https://github.com/mojodna/metricsd

It's awesome to see the community standardizing around a simple way of transporting measurements into a storage and analytics system.

richyzhang• 14 years ago

I would like to see Flyash you mentioned in the readme as soon as possible. For a monitor system, it is a crucial part.

nwmcsween• 14 years ago

Why should I use this over http://collectd.org?

mattyb3• 14 years ago

You don't use this over collectd; you can use BatsD with it. These tools are complementary.

collectd is very good at collecting system-level metrics and sending them somewhere. Batsd is a system for receiving those metrics and storing them.

(Note that collectd has a graphite plugin, but not one for (B|St)atsD. You'd need to write a proxy.)

igs123• 14 years ago

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Batsd: 37 Signals' Ruby Statsd implementation persisting to Redis

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