Docs » Available host and application monitors in Splunk Observability Cloud » Configure application receivers for networks » Statsd

Statsd 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector uses the Smart Agent receiver with the statsd monitor type to collect statsd metrics. It listens on a configured address and port to receive the statsd metrics.

This integration supports the Counter, Timer, Gauge, and Set types, which are dispatched as the Splunk Observability Cloud types counter, gauge, gauge, and gauge respectively. Statsd extensions such as tags are not supported.

This integration is available for Kubernetes and Linux.

Benefits 🔗

After you configure the integration, you can access these features:

Installation 🔗

Follow these steps to deploy this integration:

  1. Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform:

  2. Configure the monitor, as described in the Configuration section.

  3. Restart the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

Verify the installation 🔗

To verify the installation, send statsd metrics locally with netcat as follows, then verify in Splunk Observability Cloud that the metric arrived:

$ echo "statsd.test:1|g" | nc -w 1 -u 127.0.0.1 8125

For Kubernetes environments, use the status.hostIP environment variable to verify the installation. This environment variable is the IP address of the node where the pod is running.

Configuration 🔗

To use this integration of a Smart Agent monitor with the Collector:

  1. Include the Smart Agent receiver in your configuration file.

  2. Add the monitor type to the Collector configuration, both in the receiver and pipelines sections.

Example 🔗

To activate this integration, add the following to your Collector configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/statsd:
    type: statsd
    ...  # Additional config

Next, add the monitor to the service.pipelines.metrics.receivers section of your configuration file:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/statsd]

Configuration settings 🔗

The following table shows the configuration options for the statsd monitor:

Option

Required

Type

Description

listenAddress

No

string

The host or address on which to bind the UDP listener that accepts statsd datagrams. The default value is localhost.

listenPort

No

integer

The port on which to listen for statsd messages. The default value is 8125.

metricPrefix

No

string

A prefix in metric names that needs to be removed before metric name conversion.

converters

No

list of objects (see below)

A list converters to convert statsd metric names into SignalFx metric names and dimensions.

The nested converters configuration object has the following fields:

Option

Required

Type

Description

pattern

No

string

A pattern to match against statsd metric names.

metricName

No

string

A format to compose a metric name to report to Splunk Observability Cloud.

The Smart Agent and Collector don’t do any built-in filtering of metrics that come out of this monitor.

Metrics 🔗

The agent does not do any built-in filtering of metrics coming out of this monitor.

See the section below to learn how metrics can be collected with this monitor.

Add dimensions to statsd metrics 🔗

The statsd monitor can parse keywords from a statsd metric name by a set of converters configured by a user, as shown in the following example:

converters:
  - pattern: "cluster.cds_{traffic}_{mesh}_{service}-vn_{}.{action}"
    ...

This converter parses traffic, mesh, service, and action as dimensions from the cluster.cds_egress_ecommerce-demo-mesh_gateway-vn_tcp_8080.update_success metric. If a section has only a pair of brackets without a name, it does not capture a dimension.

When multiple converters are provided, a metric is converted by the first converter with a matching pattern to the metric name.

Format metric names 🔗

You can customize a metric name by providing a format string within the converter configuration, as shown in the following example:

converters:
  - pattern: "cluster.cds_{traffic}_{mesh}_{service}-vn_{}.{action}"
    metricName: "{traffic}.{action}"

The metrics that match to the given pattern are reported to Infrastructure Monitoring as {traffic}.{action}. For instance, metric cluster.cds_egress_ecommerce-demo-mesh_gateway-vn_tcp_8080.update_success is reported as egress.update_success.

metricName is required for a converter configuration. A converter is deactivated if metricName is not provided.

Data points get a host dimension of the current host that the agent is running on, not the host from which the statsd metric was sent. For this reason, send statsd metrics to a local agent instance. If you don’t want the host dimension, you can set disableHostDimensions: true on the monitor configuration.

Troubleshooting 🔗

If you are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, try these tips:

  • Submit a case in the Splunk Support Portal.

    • Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers

  • Call Splunk Customer Support

    • Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers

  • Ask a question and get answers through community support at Splunk Answers.

    • Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers and free trial users

  • Join the Splunk #observability user group Slack channel to communicate with customers, partners, and Splunk employees worldwide

To learn about even more support options, see Splunk Customer Success.