Working with the DogStatsD interface

StatsD is an open source project for publishing application metrics, originally conceived by the photo-sharing website Flickr. It went through multiple implementations and its latest version is a Node.js application. The StatsD code and documentation can be found at https://github.com/statsd/statsd.

The StatsD service typically runs on port 8125 and listens for statistics sent over UDP or TCP. By default, StatsD listens on the UDP port and sends aggregates to charting and monitoring applications such as Graphite. Datadog bundles this service as DogStatsD and it's available out of the box as a UDP service running on port 8125, where the Datadog Agent runs.

The status of the DogStatsD service can be checked for in the datadog-agent status output on the host where the Datadog Agent is running, and it would look like the following:

=========
DogStatsD
=========
  Event Packets: 0
  Event Parse Errors: 0
  ...