Receive and aggregate metrics from StatsD

The Chronosphere Collector supports Graphite metrics and two methods of configuring Graphite-related ingestion: StatsD or Carbon. To enable or make changes to Graphite ingestion, contact Chronosphere Support.

StatsD sends unaggregated data to the Chronosphere Collector, which aggregates StatsD metrics at a configurable interval and sends them to Chronosphere Observability Platform.

Deploy the Chronosphere Collector

StatsD metrics libraries primarily send metrics using the UDP protocol, which sends packets with no handshakes, retries, acknowledgments, or other reliability mechanisms. Using UDP to send data over the network increases the risk of losing metrics data due to lost packets and other network issues. Keeping communication on the same Kubernetes node reduces these issues because local UDP communication is generally more stable.

Install Collector as a Kubernetes DaemonSet

To install the Chronosphere Collector, follow the steps described in Kubernetes Collector installation to retrieve metrics.

Configure Chronosphere Collector for StatsD metrics

Perform the following steps to configure Chronosphere Collector for StatsD metrics.

Use the configuration in the annotated manifest (opens in a new tab) from Kubernetes Collector installation to retrieve metrics as a starting point.
Enable StatsD mode using the push.statsd.enabled YAML collection in the Collector manifest:
```
push:
  statsd:
    enabled: true
```
Configure additional StatsD configuration options under the push.statsd YAML collection as necessary.

StatsD configuration options

You can configure the following options in the Collector manifest for StatsD, with the exception of those denoted in the following list as not configurable, which appear in code configuration output but cannot be overridden by changing their values.

enabled: A Boolean option that determines whether to enable StatsD mode under the push.statsd.enabled YAML collection in the Chronosphere Collector configuration. Default: true.
listenAddress: The address and port on which the server listens for connections. Point StatsD clients sending metrics to this address and port. Default: 0.0.0.0:3031.
listenProtocol: Defines whether to use udp or tcp protocols. Default: udp.
aggregation: A YAML collection that defines how the Collector ingests a data sample.

When Chronosphere Collector ingests a data sample, it aggregates the data based on the metric type and sends a single data point to Observability Platform that represents the sample for the defined interval. These aggregations reduce network egress and processed writes to Observability Platform.

Chronosphere Collector aggregates data points based on the metric type as follows:
- counters (not configurable): Sums all data point values for a time series and sends the SUM as a DELTA COUNTER.
- gauges (not configurable): Selects the LAST value for a time series in the interval.
- timers: A YAML collection that defines the aggregation type of timers.
  
  By default, Chronosphere Collector doesn’t aggregate timer values. Aggregation rules are required to aggregate timers at ingestion.
  - aggregationType: Defines how Chronosphere Collector aggregates timers. Default: none, which supports using Graphite to query metrics.
    
    Set this value to histogram to instead send a DELTA EXPONENTIAL HISTOGRAM that can be queried only by using PromQL.
- interval: Defines the amount of time before writing to Observability Platform. Use an interval value that aligns with your licensed persisted writes and cardinality ratio. A more frequent aggregation interval increases persisted writes. Default: 60s.
- inactiveExpireAfter: Determines the amount of time before Chronosphere Collector evicts unused aggregation keys from the local cache. Default: 2m.

Example configuration

The following example YAML collection lists all the configuration options for receiving StatsD metrics with Chronosphere Collector:

push:
  statsd:
    enabled: true
    listenAddress: 0.0.0.0:3031
    listenProtocol: udp
    aggregation:
      timers:
        # Valid values are "histogram" and "none"
        aggregationType: none 
      interval: 60s
      inactiveExpireAfter: "2m"

DogStatsD Carbon