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 StatsD-Bridge
 =============
 
-StatsD-Bridge allows receiving StatsD-style metrics and exporting them as Prometheus metrics.
+StatsD-Bridge receives StatsD-style metrics and exporting them as Prometheus metrics.
+
+## Overview
+
+To pipe metrics from an existing StatsD environment into Prometheus, configure StatsD's repeater backend to repeat all received packets to a StatsD-Bridge process. This bridge translates StatsD metrics to Prometheus metrics via configured mapping rules.
+
+    +----------+                     +-----------------+                        +--------------+
+    |  StatsD  |---(UDP repeater)--->|  StatsD-Bridge  |<---(scrape /metrics)---|  Prometheus  |
+    +----------+                     +-----------------+                        +--------------+
+
+## Building and Running
+
+    $ go build
+    $ ./statsd_bridge --help
+    Usage of ./statsd_bridge:
+    -listeningAddress=":8080": The address on which to expose generated Prometheus metrics.
+    -mappingConfig="mapping.conf": Metric mapping configuration file name.
+    -statsdListeningAddress=":8126": The UDP address on which to receive statsd metric lines.
+    -summaryFlushInterval=15m0s: How frequently to reset all summary metrics.
+
+## Tests
+
+    $ go test
+
+## Metric Mapping and Configuration
+
+The StatsD-Bridge can be configured to translate specific dot-separated StatsD metrics into labeled Prometheus metrics via a simple mapping language. A mapping definition starts with a line matching the StatsD metric in question, with `*`s acting as wildcards for each dot-separated metric component. The lines following the matching expression must contain one `label="value"` pair each, and at least define the metric name (label name `name`). The Prometheus metric is then constructed from these labels. `$n`-style references in the label value are replaced by the n-th wildcard match in the matching line, starting at 1. Multiple matching definitions are separated by one or more empty lines. The first mapping rule that matches a StatsD metric wins.
+
+An example mapping configuration:
+
+    test.dispatcher.*.*.*
+    name="dispatcher_events"
+    processor="$1"
+    action="$2"
+    outcome="$3"
+    job="test_dispatcher"
+    
+    *.signup.*.*
+    name="signup_events"
+    provider="$2"
+    outcome="$3"
+    job="$1_server"
+    
+This would transform these example StatsD metrics as into Prometheus metrics as follows:
+
+    test.dispatcher.FooProcessor.send.success
+     => dispatcher_events{processor="FooProcessor", action="send", outcome="success", job="test_dispatcher"}
+    
+    foo_product.signup.facebook.failure
+     => signup_events{provider="facebook", outcome="failure", job="foo_product_server"}
+
+Metrics that don't match any mapping in the configuration file are translated into Prometheus metrics without any labels and with certain characters escaped (`_` -> `__`; `-` -> `__`; `.` -> `_`).
+
+In general, the different metric types are translated as follows, with certain suffixes appended to the Prometheus metric names:
+
+    StatsD gauge   -> Prometheus gauge (suffix `_gauge`)
+    
+    StatsD counter -> Prometheus counter (suffix `_counter`)
+    
+    StatsD timer   -> Prometheus summary (suffix `_timer`)        <-- indicates timer quantiles
+                   -> Prometheus counter (suffix `_timer_total`)  <-- indicates total time spent
+                   -> Prometheus counter (suffix `_timer_count`)  <-- indicates total number of timer events