Is there an issue with using Statsd timers for non-timer data?

Question

https://github.com/etsy/statsd/blob/master/docs/metric_types.md#timing

"StatsD figures out percentiles, average (mean), standard deviation, sum, lower and upper bounds for the flush interval."

I'd like to take advantage of that behaviour for other stats, such as the number queries per request or the number of bytes received/send from/to the user, but those stats don't represent a span of time. Can I use the timer type for non timer data?

Answer 1

In short you can. The term "timers" is imho unfortunate as what statsd is really computing is a few statistical properties to represent the underlying distribution of your data.

Looking at the code there is no requirement that the values you are using with timers represent some measure of time. They just have to be numerical.