Further to my last post, I’d like to introduce you to a working implementation of the stats gathering mechanism using Etsy StatsD and NodeJS.
StatsD is a Node.JS stats server created by the people at etsy to provide a simple way of logging useful statistics from software. These statistics are an invaluable way of monitoring the performance of your application, monitoring the performance of software changes and diagnosing faults.
This plugin gives you an overview of what is happening in your Known install by logging important system level things – events, errors, exceptions etc. This lets you get a very clear idea of how your Known network is performing, and quickly see the effect that changes have on your users.
Installation
- Install Node.JS, either from github or the package manager for your OS
- Install StatsD
- Not required, but highly recommended, install a Graphite server for graph visualisation
- Place this plugin in IdnoPlugins/StatsD
- Add the following to your “`config.ini“`
statistics_collector = IdnoPlugins\StatsD\StatsDStatisticsCollector; statsd_enabled = true;
Optionally, you can specify one or more of the following extra options, (although the defaults are usually ok):
statsd_host = localhost statsd_port = 8125 statsd_bucket = some_name statsd_samplerate = 1
statsd_samplerate is handy on really busy systems (see Statsd’s notes on the subject), but in a nutshell, setting this to something like 0.1 (capture one in every 10 count or timer events) is handy if you find StatsD being overloaded.
If everything is working, you should now be happily graphing some useful stats.