Metrics
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve developed some type of toy app. Maybe even deployed a few. Perhaps you even have users that are happily plugging away with your app! But, do you know how it is performing? Do you know what your users tend to use the most? Do you know when things are failing, maybe even silently? In this article, I’m going to build a metrics stack and hook up my Discord Bot to it so I can start seeing just how much use it’s getting
The Idea
So, I’ve used Grafana at work. I believe it’s even backed with InfluxDB. We do time-series metrics gathering for successful executions of a service, when an expected failure condition occurs, and even when an unexpected condition occurs. This is great as it’s plugged into PagerDuty that has a bunch of alerts and checks against the metrics in InfluxDB. So, when something fails that’s really important at 2 a.m. I get a call from PagerDuty and I get to go to work a bit early.
Alright, so that’s an enterprise solution there. You probably don’t want your own app waking you up when a user hits an error. But, how would you even know it happened without your user notifying you? My my metrics gathering goal is to track servers the bot joins, bot departures, queries per server, queries per user, vendor cache resets, queries that return no results, and the total amount of results returned across all servers.
The Setup
Now, I could go about this and write some sort of database that’s fronted with some services and then invoke those services with my app. But, that’s a lot of work. Other people that are smarter than me have already figured this out. I’m researching a few solutions to implement. So far, I’ve found:
- Grafana – a metrics visualization web application
- InfluxDB – a time-series database
- Graphite – A statsd compliant time-series metrics service
- Prometheus – Another statsd compliant time-series metrics service that’s supposedly better than Graphite
- Statsd – a protocol for metrics gathering, also a tool that Esty made
I’ll be researching these more to determine what I might actually use. If I find better alternatives, I’ll be sure to write something on them as well. For now, I think I have some sort of solution with these options.
I’m hoping to also use Docker in setting this all up. Maybe there will even be a handy Dockerfile I can use that has all the things needed to get this up and running.
If you have any other suggestions, let me know in the comments! If you have ideas on what else to comment. I’ll write something about the metrics system and post it soon!