Dirt simple StatsD server

source/2013-01-26-dirt-simple-statsd-server-for-local-development.html.markdown

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+---
+title: Dirt simple StatsD server for local development
+
+---
+
+We instrument quite a lot of our code, especially with [StatsD]. It's so easy to
+implement, it's basically a no-brainer. The overhead of the [UDP packets] is so
+low that you can afford to instrument pretty much everything.
+
+There is one pretty large mental investment cost centre though, which is what
+to do about collecting, graphing, logging, rotating, storing and analysing all
+the collected StatsD data.
+
+Those questions are best answered in production (we like [collectd],
+[Graphite] with the [Graphene] frontend) by your Ops team.
+
+To simplify local development, I wanted something so that I could see my
+instrumentation easily in the console, whenver I thought that I might need it:
+
+<script src="https://gist.github.com/leehambley/5186145.js"></script>
+
+We use [foreman] for most development projects and thus we save this little
+script as `./bin/statsd`, change the mode to `+x` so that we can run it, and
+add this line to our `Procfile`
+
+    statsd: ./bin/statsd
+
+The `term-ansicolor` gem makes the statsd lines standout really clearly, and
+we can rest assured that in the production environment that nothing bad will
+happen because of different logging configs.
+
+[statsd]: https://github.com/etsy/statsd/
+[UDP packets]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol
+[collectd]: http://collectd.org/
+[Graphite]: http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/1.0/overview.html
+[Graphene]: http://jondot.github.com/graphene/
+[foreman]: https://github.com/ddollar/foreman