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N|Solid 2.2 Lands with More Metrics and Effortless StatsD Integrations

Our flagship product, N|Solid, enables our users to derive unprecedented insights into their Node.js applications through a rich set of Node-specific metrics. Today, we are pleased to announce N|Solid v2.2, which comes with an expanded set of metrics.

Even better, our enhanced N|Solid StatsD integration makes it easier for users to integrate these metrics with any StatsD compliant metrics platforms. This means users can use their existing workflows to analyse and visualize Node-specific metrics piped from N|Solid. At the same time, users continue to benefit from features that the N|Solid Console already provides, like heap snapshots, CPU profiles, and threshold-based alerting.

What new metrics does N|Solid v2.2 provide?

If you’re already an N|Solid customer, you’re probably familiar with the set of metrics that N|Solid provides today. These metrics are available from the N|Solid CLI via the nsolid-cli metrics command.

The new metrics that come with N|Solid v2.2 are:

• Resource usage (rusage) metrics. These metrics allow you to monitor CPU, memory (heap and stack), block I/O, IPC, signals and context switching statistics.
• Garbage collection metrics: These give you deep insights into garbage collection activity pertaining to your Node.js application.
• Event loop metrics. These metrics help you in understanding the health of the Node.js Event Loop.

You can find a detailed list of metrics here. So, we've added new metrics that provide even deeper insights into your Node.js apps - but how can you integrate both the new and existing metrics from N|Solid into StatsD?

Integration with StatsD

First, let’s look at what StatsD actually is. StatsD is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services.

If you’re using a StatsD-compliant metrics analysis/visualization tool like Graphite, DataDog and Grafana, it’s now simple to configure N|Solid to dispatch metrics to your existing tooling.

To get your data piped from N|Solid to StatsD, all you need to do is set the NSOLID_STATSD environment variable to point to your StatsD endpoint - the host and port where your StatsD daemon (agent) listens on. You’re all set! Node-specific metrics from N|Solid will now appear on your metrics dashboard as soon as your Node.js process starts running.

New to N|Solid?

If you’ve never tried N|Solid, this is a great time to do so. N|Solid is a fully compatible Node.js runtime that has been enhanced to address the needs of the Enterprise. N|Solid provides meaningful insights into the runtime process and the underlying systems.

A few of these insights are in-flight asynchronous event processing, visualizations of key performance metrics, and the monitoring of Node-specific telemetry for a more complete view of application behavior.

N|Solid provides powerful functionality for monitoring Node.js at massive scale across your entire environment. Visualizations spanning hundreds of processes across multiple hosts provide intuitive monitoring of your application performance so you can focus on analyzing performance, not swimming through a sea of data.

As always, we’re happy to hear your thoughts - feel free to get in touch with our team or reach out to us on Twitter at @nodesource.