As I've seen the team build out more features and tooling into N|Solid, I've realized just how vast the world of metrics, collection, and graphing is.

There's an abundance of tools that are underpinned by a few key systems. One of the most usable - both in terms of DX and integrations - is StatsD.

Navigating through the sea of articles, tools, and marketing surrounding StatsD can be a bit rough - there's so much out there that it's almost impossible to find the valuable parts now.

Today, I've gone ahead and collected some of the tools and resources I've found most helpful so far. Hopefully, they'll help you cut through the cruft and start using StatsD for metrics gathering in no time.

Storage & Graphing for StatsD

1. Graphite - Graphite is an enterprise-grade storage, and graphing tool for hard metrics piped out from applications via metrics tools. Metrics can be fed into Graphite from StatsD in a few different aggregators (see the sections below) or by forwarding from StatsD into Graphite.
2. Grafana - Grafana is another holistic graphing tool similar to Graphite, and can even display metrics from Graphite. Grafana has a highly interactive UI and is a solid choice as a target for StatsD data. In addition to DIY, Grafana offers hosted options that are easy to spin up and start consuming data.
3. DataDog - DataDog is a larger, less DIY option that gets your metrics piped in and understandable rapidly. They have their own implementation of StatsD (there are many implementations) called DogStatsD that adds in some DataDog-specific metric handling.

Ecosystem Tooling and Tutorials for StatsD

1. N|Solid StatsD - We recently integrated a StatsD daemon that will ship out your Node.js applications’ data to StatsD, which will then pipe it out to other StatsD tooling, like Graphite, Grafana, DataDog, and more.
2. Graphine - Graphene is a toolkit for Graphite that provides a highly customizable dashboard, aesthetically pleasing, and real-time visualizations as a front-end for Graphite. Internally, many of us high
3. Datadog’s StatsD Deep Dive - An excellent in-depth explanation on what StatsD is, the different components and their flow, what and how they report metrics, and what StatsD as a whole solves. Fantastic article.
4. Bucky - Bucky is a tiny server meant to connect CollecD daemons and StatsD clients, which then pipes them out to Graphite.
5. Graphite + StatsD with Docker - There’s a quick-setup docker image that includes Graphite and StatsD that’s a high-quality tool for getting up and running with a Graphite and StatsD monitoring system quickly.

Just one last thing...

If there are other StatsD or metrics-related topics you'd like to learn more about, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at @NodeSource - always interested in new ideas and how we can help the enable Node.js ecosystem to monitor with metrics better.

If you're interested in guidance around StatsD and getting metrics out of your Node.js applications effectively, you should take a look at our trainings and arch evals - we'll be able to help solidify your Node.js apps and get the metrics and performance you're looking for.