Delete ":" from metric names to allow statsd server insert them

[odin-delrio]

(Also opened for the original java statsd client at tim-group/java-statsd-client#46)

Hi all!

I'm currently using statsd to automatically record all the metrics provided by some spring boot application.
In my case, spring is creating some metrics with ":" in the name (for some hystrix with feign stats), and these ones are skipped by the statsd server (https://github.com/etsy/statsd).

That implementation allow to insert multiple metric types to the same metric:

$ echo "xxx:1|c:3|g" | nc -u -w0 127.0.0.1 8125 && echo "counters" | nc localhost 8126 && echo "gauges" | nc localhost 8126

Produces this output:

{ 'statsd.bad_lines_seen': 0,
  'statsd.packets_received': 1,
  'statsd.metrics_received': 1,
  xxx: 1 }
END

{ xxx: 3 }
END

This (undocumented) statsd feature does not allow me to make a PR to statsd repository... So, That's why I'm here,
would be acceptable to make you a PR (or request for the change) to simply delete the ":" in the metric names?

The statsd server is already deleting some characters from metric name:
https://github.com/etsy/statsd/blob/master/stats.js#L170

[masci]

Hi @odin-delrio,

can you tell me more about your current setup? If you're using java-dogstatsd as a statsd client, why can't you just strip the : on your code before sending over the metric?

[odin-delrio]

Hi @masci

I can escape them in my own code, in fact, I'm already doing it overriding the needed Spring Bean...
I could make a PR to Spring Boot Actuator to change how they interact with the statsd client, but, I was thinking that fixing this here will be nice for all statsd client users that are not using Spring Boot.

Anyway, I thought that this statsd client and the original one were interchangeable (both are under same package names) but this is not currently true...

Spring is relying in this constructor (you can see that here) which is not currently available in DataDog implementation of the statsd client. Sorry for not test this implementation with Spring boot before open the issue, I assumed that it was compatible...

For summarize, what do you think about:
1 - Add a new constructor to DataDog Statsd client to make it compatible with the original one.

public NonBlockingStatsDClient(String prefix, String hostname, int port, StatsDClientErrorHandler errorHandler) throws StatsDClientException

2 - Escape in the Statsd client the ":" in the metric names avoiding to deal with that to every users of the library.

[robinst]

Looks like this has been fixed in spring-boot. Can this issue be closed?

[odin-delrio]

I fixed there in spring yes, but if this is done here every user (not only the spring-boot ones) can take the benefit of this...