Using Etsy's StatsD in a Windows Environment

Question

What will I need to use Etsy's Statsd in a Windows Environment? My intentions are to create a .net client to use Statsd.

Answer 1

Your best bet is to have a Linux server with statsd and Graphite installed. You would then just need to write some C# code to make the UDP call to get the metric into the system.

[UPDATE (6/23/2014): I came across a statsd/Graphite clone called statsd.net that looks promising but largely lacking on the Graphite side of the equation. I still think the best bet is to use the actual statsd/Graphite projects since any clone is necessary playing catch-up.]

Answer 2

I have statsd+graphite running in my Windows environment using the C# client NStatsD.

Here are my notes for getting the Linux VM setup:

Note: I know enough Linux to be dangerous but am otherwise a noob and could be doing something unwittingly horrible.

1. Install Ubuntu Server 12.04. I used VirtualBox for dev and then later EC2 for prod.

2. Download graphite-fabric to your home folder. This is a script that will download, compile and install graphite and statsd. It expects a clean box and uses nginx for the web server.

   sudo apt-get install git

   git clone git://github.com/gingerlime/graphite-fabric.git

   cd graphite-fabric/

3. Install prereq's for fabric

   sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

4. The next steps are a download, compile and install which can take some time. It is worthwhile setting a keep alive on any putty ssh session before continuing.

5. Now install as per gingerlime's instructions in the README.md - including the requirements section.

6. Install statsd as per gingerlime's instructions.
7. Reboot
8. Execute netstat -nulp and observe 8125 is in use to confirm statsd is listening.
9. Check carbon is running tail /opt/graphite/storage/log/carbon-cache/carbon-cache-a/listener.log. If it isn't, try sudo /etc/init.d/carbon start

Now you have your server running, try throwing some counters at it with the NStatsD client.

Timezone fix:

This will fix graphite to graph times in your local zone

1. cd /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite
2. sudo cp local_settings.py.example local_settings.py
3. sudo chown www-data:www-data local_settings.py (check with ls -l that permissions look right)
4. sudo pico local_settings.py Set TIME_ZONE to something like Australia/Sydney. Discover what timezones you can use in /usr/share/zoneinfo/
5. Save and restart the box (not sure how to make it pick up the change without restart)

EC2 Notes

root is disabled on EC2. Fabric prompts for a root password which you don't have. Use the -i keyfile argument with fab to give it your ssh keyfile instead.

VirtualBox Notes

VBoxVMService was handy to automatically run the VM as a service in my Windows dev environment.

Answer 3

TL;DR:

• statsd.net is a scalable statsd clone with lots of cool extras, and designed for windows-centric environments. First production release is on the 29th of May, 2013
• statsd-csharp-client is a lightweight statsd and statsd.net client, available for .net 3.5, 4.0 and 4.5 via nuget.

Full Disclosure: I'm the author of these two projects and I wrote them because I couldn't take etsy's statsd service to production - my organisation isn't ready to deploy and support nodejs-based services.

I had the same problem in my organisation - we're a windows-centric environment that wants to collect stats from all over the world into a single graphite repository. I had initially thought of using etsy's statsd but my company is not yet ready to roll with nodejs services in production. Along the way I found that having my own aggregation service meant I can do lots of interesting things like add memcached support for scalability, add new aggregators and so on.

The service is usable in console mode right now, and will be ready for production use from the 29th of May 2013 onwards.

Answer 4

We've re-built Graphite/StatsD in pure .NET. It is currently being used in production environment, processing around 600M datapoints daily.

Statsify:

Answer 5

There is quite a few open-source StatsD client implementations available in different Language including C#.NET. Etsy provide one on their github examples, also check out AppFirst version of statsd_clients.

Answer 6

Current statsd and nodejs versions allow you to run statsd on Windows without amendments. statsd package.json file already contains scripts to install and uninstall it as Windows service.

The installation procedure would be:

• Install nodejs for Windows
• Create a directory like C:\StatsD
• Open a console window and do cd \StatsD
• Then do npm install https://github.com/etsy/statsd.git
• In node_modules\statsd directory create your own config.json
• In the console window do cd node_modules\statsd and npm run-script install-windows-service

However, Graphite only runs on Linux.

Answer 7

You need a statsd server to connect to.
You also need a client library to connect to it, e.g. this one and the nuget package of it.