Send StatsD metrics to Dynatrace

StatsD is an industry standard for communicating arbitrary statistics and other metrics in a vendor-independent way via UDP. We recommend that you use Dynatrace OneAgent to ingest your metrics, as OneAgent comes with a StatsD daemon out of the box. This means that any application or library that supports StatsD can send metrics to Dynatrace. You only need to install OneAgent and make sure that your StatsD client uses the right port (18125 by default).

If you can't install OneAgent on a host with your StatsD metrics, however, you can use an ActiveGate to act as a remote listener.

Enable DynatraceStatsD

The DynatraceStatsD listener comes with OneAgent version 1.201+. You only need to enable DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion at the environment or host level. Note that the host-level configuration overrides the environment configuration.

Enable at the environment level

To enable DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion at the environment level

In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings and select Preferences > Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Dynatrace StatsD.

Enable for a single host

To enable DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion only for selected hosts

In the Dynatrace menu, go to Hosts and select a host name to open the host overview page.
Select More (…) > Settings.
Select Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Dynatrace StatsD.

Enable remote StatsD

ActiveGate version 1.227+

If you can't use OneAgent to ingest StatsD metrics, you can use an Environment ActiveGate as your DynatraceStatsD ingestion point. Your ActiveGate needs to be able to connect to your StatsD client over UDP.

DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion is disabled by default on an ActiveGate.

To enable DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion

Edit the extensionsuser.conf file in the following directory
- Linux /var/lib/dynatrace/remotepluginmodule/agent/conf/extensionsuser.conf
- Windows C:\ProgramData\dynatrace\remotepluginmodule\agent\conf\extensionsuser.conf
Set the statsdenabled parameter to true:
```
plaintext
statsdenabled=true
```

Restart the Extension Execution Controller service.

Linux Run the following commands:

for systems with SystemV:

shell
service extensionsmodule stop
service extensionsmodule start

for systems with systemd:

shell
systemctl stop extensionsmodule
systemctl start extensionsmodule

Windows Use Task Manager and restart the Dynatrace Extensions Controller service or run the following commands:
```
shell
net stop "Dynatrace Extensions Controller"
net start "Dynatrace Extensions Controller"
```

Note that the default port for remote StatsD is different than for the OneAgent DynatraceStatsD listener (18126). See Remote StatsD.

This file is not modified during ActiveGate updates.

Make sure that your ActiveGate can connect to your StatsD client. For example, you should configure the DNS name for your ActiveGate and make sure that it works after a new IP address is assigned from DHCP.

Communication port

OneAgent listener

The default DynatraceStatsD UDP listening port for the OneAgent listener is 18125. If necessary, you can use the oneagentctl command to check or change the metric ingestion port. Changing the port requires restart of OneAgent. Add --restart-service to the command to restart OneAgent automatically.

Check the ingestion port

Use the --get-extensions-statsd-port parameter to show the current DynatraceStatsd UDP listening port (default = 18125).

Linux: ./oneagentctl --get-extensions-statsd-port
Windows: .\oneagentctl.exe --get-extensions-statsd-port

Set a custom ingestion port

Use the --set-extensions-statsd-port=<arg> parameter to set a custom DynatraceStatsd UDP listening port.

Linux: ./oneagentctl --set-extensions-statsd-port=18125 --restart-service
Windows: .\oneagentctl.exe --set-extensions-statsd-port=18125 --restart-service

Remote StatsD

The default DynatraceStatsD UDP listening port for a remote listener is 18126.

To change the default 18126 listening port, modify the StatsdPort parameter in the ActiveGate extensionsuser.conf file:

Linux /var/lib/dynatrace/remotepluginmodule/agent/conf/extensionsuser.conf
Windows C:\ProgramData\dynatrace\remotepluginmodule\agent\conf\extensionsuser.conf:

plaintext
StatsdPort=18126

Topology awareness

Using DynatraceStatsD with OneAgent, the host ID and host name context are added as dimensions to each metric automatically. For more information, see Metric ingestion. Note that we're already working on more automatic metric enrichments. For remote ingestion, no extra enrichment is added. If you want to add context to your metrics, you'll need to add dimensions of your choice to your StatsD metrics.

Security

The DynatraceStatsD OneAgent listener only accepts input from localhost addresses. This means that only processes that are running on the same host as OneAgent can leverage the interface. This ensures that no unauthorized programs are sending data to your Dynatrace environment.

StatsD metric format

DynatraceStatsD accepts the following metrics in the native StatsD format:

count

plaintext
<metric name>:<value>|c

gauge

plaintext
<metric name>:<value>|g

time

plaintext
<metric name>:<value>|ms

histogram

plaintext
<metric name>:<value>|h

set

plaintext
<metric name>:<value>|s

distribution

plaintext
<metric name>:<value>|d

DynatraceStatsD extends the original protocol to enable you to also send dimensions. Use the following format:

plaintext
<metric name>:<value>|g|#<Dimension1>:<value>,<Dimension2>:<value>

Datasource limits and performance

The limits are based on the test that deploys a Linux machine in the AWS cloud. The purpose of this test is to determine how much StatsD load the infrastructure framework can handle.

Hardware specification

OneAgent and ActiveGate are installed in a Linux-based VM in Amazon EC2 c5.large instance type.

CPU: x2
RAM: 4 GiB
Storage: EBS
Network bandwidth: up to 10 GBPS

	Total records	Packets	Lines per packet	Connections	Metrics
StatsD on OneAgent	290,000	11,600	25	1	1
StatsD on ActiveGate	345,00	13,800	25	1	1