Monitoring StatsD: metric types, format + code examples

StatsD is a widely-used monitoring solution that collects custom metrics from instrumented code, originally developed by Etsy's Erik Kastnen in Node.js but now available in multiple language implementations such as C, Golang, Python, and Ruby. The framework involves various metric types including gauges, counters, timers, histograms, meters, and sets, each serving different purposes like measuring instantaneous values, counting events, timing durations, and tracking unique occurrences. StatsD allows for decoupling application behavior from monitoring processes, but requires proper network configuration and can face challenges in containerized environments due to the loss of metric origin information and the potential for the server becoming a single point of failure. Sysdig Monitor offers an alternative approach by automatically collecting and tagging StatsD metrics in containerized applications, thus simplifying network configuration and enhancing segmentation. The blog post also provides code examples for implementing StatsD in Golang, Node.js, and Python, and suggests considering the Prometheus stack as an alternative, recommending users to evaluate their metric needs between dot-metrics and tagged metrics.