Chase,

Ori mentioned that you might have plans to replace txstatsd as our StatsD collector for graphite/carbon. Do you have such plans and can you elaborate?

The reason I'm asking is because we currently operate txstatsd with a non statsd complaint message processor which has some unexpected, to me, side effects with respect to counters. On the other hand, we cannot use the compliant processor because it uses a whole bunch of unwanted prefixes.

The side effect to this is that I cant just use a vanilla StatsD client in my code, and having looked at the internals of the non compliant processor I'm worried we're abusing it and thus potentially misinterpreting its results in other places (it uses mark() to store statistics which doesn't do aggregation and keeps it across time points). On the other hand, it's implementation of timer is very friendly in that it gives us percentile breakdowns and such...

So, my current thought is either to write another processor with better counter semantics; or we should replace it entirely with a vanilla statsd implementation (like etsy's -- which we might have to end up patching to get the nice timer behavior.) I suspect that writing another processor and hosting a custom deb locally is probably the "easiest" option.

It's probably worth pointing out that txstatsd is currently unmaintained -- Sidnei left Canonical for Google sometime near the end of last year and hasn't touched the code since.

~Matt Walker