Updated Cloudwatch backend for StatsD

A month ago I successfully chained together log4net, StatsD and CloudWatch. I put together a backend for StatsD in node.js called aws-cloudwatch-statsd-backend.

Yesterday I finally updated it into something I can actually use. I’m using it in production on Cocoin.

StatsD’s capability of pushing metadata along with the request is limited. But you can parse the bucket name for information. I wanted to extract namespace and metric name.

Currently I’m sending UDP packages of this style to count the requests on the site.

App/Controller/Action/Request:1|c

This get’s translated to a cloudwatch request with App/Controller/Action as a namespace and Request as the metric name.

Using the bucket name for metadata tampers with generality but doesn’t blow it completely. You can still add on arbitrary backends.

To install it, use npm.

npm install aws-cloudwatch-statsd-backend

Here is an example configuration.

{
    backends: [ "aws-cloudwatch-statsd-backend" ],
    cloudwatch: 
    {
        accessKeyId: 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID', 
        secretAccessKey: 'YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', 
        region: 'YOUR_REGION',
        processKeyForNames:true
    }
}

You can also override both the namespace and metric name (metricName) in the config.

Full documentation on the npm and GitHub pages.

My other monitoring project, CloudWatchAppender, and appender for log4net wihout aggregation, has now been downloaded 236 times. Very pleased with that.