Monitoring statsd

• Sensor (Data Collection)
  • Configuration
  • Metrics transmission

Sensor (Data Collection)

The Instana agent acts as a statsd collector daemon, and can receive metrics in the same way as a real statsd daemon. So you don't need to start another statsd daemon. If the standard statsd protocol of any client library is used, when data is sent to the sensor, up to 3000 custom metrics are displayed on the host dashboard. The host is where the agent receives the metric data. At most 1000 metrics can be collected for each metric type: counters, gauges, timers.

Configuration

By default, the statsd sensor is disabled. To enable the sensor, edit the agent configuration file <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml:

com.instana.plugin.statsd:
  enabled: true
  ports:
    udp: 8125
    mgmt: 8126
  bind-ip: "0.0.0.0" # all IPs by default
  flush-interval: 10 # in seconds

Note: Do not run the regular statsd service, it will prevent the agent from listening on these ports. Run only the agent, which will act as statsd server.

Metrics transmission

Via UDP, metrics are sent to the configured UDP port in the statsd format. For information about the format, see the statsd documentation.

For example, the following script increments a counter called hits by one:

echo "hits:1|c" | nc -u -w0 127.0.0.1 8125

Using \n as a separator, multiple metrics are sent via UDP to the configured UDP port in the statsd format:

echo "hits:1|c\nlatency:320|ms\nvisits:333|g\nresponse time:765|s" | nc -u -w0 127.0.0.1 8125

The sensor also accepts metrics format that includes tags:

echo "host.network_receive_errs_total:10|c|#collector:network,device:utun2,host:testmachine" | nc -u -w0 127.0.0.1 8125