Announcing a beta-version of datadog-statsd-schema gem, testers wanted!

[kigster]

Folks - after realizing how disorganized metrics and tags can be within a single organization, I put together a new ruby gem - datadog-statsd-schema — which acts as an adapter or a wrapper around dogstatsd-ruby, but adds a layer of declarative schemas for both metric names, tags and tag values. It then allows you to pass such a schema to the Emitter class, with a configuration that controls what happens when a metric violates said schema.

Consider this example (provided in the examples folder of the gem):

require 'datadog/statsd'        # this gem
require 'datadog/statsd/schema' # the new gem

# This schema defines a namespace for marathon metrics and tags.
marathon_schema = Datadog.schema do
  namespace "marathon" do
    namespace "started" do
      tags do
        tag :course, values: %w[sf-marathon new-york]
        tag :length, values: [26.212, 42.195]
        tag :units, values: %w[miles km]
      end
      metrics do
        counter "total", description: "Marathon started"
        distribution "duration", description: "Marathon duration"
      end
    end
  end
end

# Emitter is simply a wrapper around Datadog::Statsd instance.
emitter = Datadog.emitter(
  "simple_emitter",
  schema: marathon_schema,
  validation_mode: :strict,
  tags: {
    course: "sf-marathon",
    length: 26.212,
    units: "miles"
  }
)

# We can now send metrics that are validated.
emitter.increment("marathon.started.total", by: 3, tags: { course: "new-york" })
emitter.increment("marathon.started.total", by: 8, tags: { course: "new-york" })

emitter.distribution("marathon.started.duration", 43.13, tags: { course: "new-york" })
emitter.distribution("marathon.started.duration", 41.01, tags: { course: "new-york" })

Here is an example of validations in action:

• Please try it out and provide some feedback!

• And if you like the idea of pre declared and validated metrics, please leave a 👍