statsd_exporter

statsd_exporter receives StatsD-style metrics and exports them as Prometheus metrics.

Overview

With StatsD

To pipe metrics from an existing StatsD environment into Prometheus, configure StatsD's repeater backend to repeat all received packets to a statsd_exporter process. This exporter translates StatsD metrics to Prometheus metrics via configured mapping rules.

+----------+                     +-------------------+                        +--------------+
|  StatsD  |---(UDP repeater)--->|  statsd_exporter  |<---(scrape /metrics)---|  Prometheus  |
+----------+                     +-------------------+                        +--------------+

Without StatsD

Since the StatsD exporter uses the same UDP protocol as StatsD itself, you can also configure your applications to send StatsD metrics directly to the exporter. In that case, you don't need to run a StatsD server anymore.

We recommend this only as an intermediate solution and recommend switching to native Prometheus instrumentation in the long term.

DogStatsD extensions

The exporter will convert DogStatsD-style tags to prometheus labels. See Tags in the DogStatsD documentation for the concept description and Datagram Format for specifics. It boils down to appending |#tag:value,another_tag:another_value to the normal StatsD format. Tags without values (#some_tag) are not supported.

Building and Running

$ go build
$ ./statsd_exporter --help
Usage of ./statsd_exporter:
  -statsd.listen-address=":9125": The UDP address on which to receive statsd metric lines.
  -statsd.mapping-config="": Metric mapping configuration file name.
  -web.listen-address=":9102": The address on which to expose the web interface and generated Prometheus metrics.
  -web.telemetry-path="/metrics": Path under which to expose metrics.

Tests

$ go test

Metric Mapping and Configuration

The statsd_exporter 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.

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:

StatsD gauge   -> Prometheus gauge

StatsD counter -> Prometheus counter

StatsD timer   -> Prometheus summary                    <-- indicates timer quantiles
               -> Prometheus counter (suffix `_total`)  <-- indicates total time spent
               -> Prometheus counter (suffix `_count`)  <-- indicates total number of timer events

If -statsd.add-suffix is set, the exporter appends the metric type (_gauge, _counter, _timer) to the resulting metrics. This is enabled by default for backward compatibility but discouraged to use. Instead, it is better to explicitly define the full metric name in your mapping and run the exporter with -statsd.add-suffix=false.

An example mapping configuration with -statsd.add-suffix=false:

test.dispatcher.*.*.*
name="dispatcher_events_total"
processor="$1"
action="$2"
outcome="$3"
job="test_dispatcher"

*.signup.*.*
name="signup_events_total"
provider="$2"
outcome="$3"
job="${1}_server"

This would transform these example StatsD metrics into Prometheus metrics as follows:

test.dispatcher.FooProcessor.send.success
 => dispatcher_events_total{processor="FooProcessor", action="send", outcome="success", job="test_dispatcher"}

foo_product.signup.facebook.failure
 => signup_events_total{provider="facebook", outcome="failure", job="foo_product_server"}

test.web-server.foo.bar
 => test_web__server_foo_bar{}

Using Docker

You can deploy this exporter using the prom/statsd-exporter Docker image.

For example:

docker pull prom/statsd-exporter

docker run -d -p 9102:9102 -p 9125:9125/udp \
        -v $PWD/statsd_mapping.conf:/tmp/statsd_mapping.conf \
        prom/statsd-exporter -statsd.mapping-config=/tmp/statsd_mapping.conf