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BACKENDS.md

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Configuring backends

Backends must be configured through the usage of a configuration file (toml, yaml and json are supported), passed via --config-path.

Documentation is currently provided for graphite, influxdb, and newrelic backends. For datadog, statsdaemon, stdout, and cloudwatch please refer to the source code.

All configuration is in a stanza named after the backend, and takes simple key value pairs.

Graphite

Example with defaults

[graphite]
address = "localhost:2003"
dial_timeout = '5s'
write_timeout = '30s'

mode = 'tags'

global_prefix = 'stats'
global_suffix = ''

prefix_counter = 'counters'
prefix_timer = 'timers'
prefix_gauge = 'gauges'
prefix_sets = 'sets'

The configuration settings are as follows:

  • address: the graphite server to send aggregated data to
  • dial_timeout: the timeout for connecting to the graphite server
  • write_timeout: the maximum amount of time to try and write before giving up
  • mode: one of legacy, basic, or tags style naming should be used. Note that legacy and basic will silently drop all tags. If there is a need to support tags as Graphite nodes, please raise an issue.

The following 5 options will only be applied if mode is basic or tags.

  • prefix_counter: the prefix to add to all counters
  • prefix_timer: the prefix to add to all timers
  • prefix_gauge: the prefix to add to all gauges
  • prefix_sets: the prefix to add to all sets
  • gloabl_prefix: a prefix to add to all metrics

This is always applied

  • global_suffix: a suffix to add to all metrics

Metric names

When mode is basic or tags, the graphite backend will emit metrics with the following naming scheme:

[global_prefix.][prefix_<type>.]<metricname>[.aggregation_suffix][.global_suffix]

The aggregation_suffix will be count or rate for counters, and the configured aggregation functions for timers.

When mode is legacy, the graphite backend will emit metrics with the following scheme:

  • counters: stats_counts.<metricname>[.global_suffix] (count) and stats.<metricname>[.global_suffix] (rate)
  • timers: stats.timers.<metricname>.<aggregation_suffix>[.global_suffix]
  • gauges: stats.gauges.<metricname>[.global_suffix]
  • sets: stats.sets.<metricname>[.global_suffix]

InfluxDB Backend

The influxdb backend supports API versions pre-1.8 (v1) and post-1.8 (v2). The version to use is selected with the api-version key. Each version requires different settings to control where data is sent. The precision is always seconds.

Settings

The following settings apply to all versions:

  • api-endpoint: the API endpoint to use, typically a base address such as http://influxdb.local. The path is automatically determined from the api-version, so a path should only be present if there is a reverse proxy setup. Required with No default.
  • api-version: the version to use, either 1 or 2. Defaults to 2
  • compress-payload: specifies whether or not to compress metrics before sending. Defaults to true.
  • credentials: the credentials to use. This will be provided via an Authorization: Token <value> header. It is not http basic authentication (it is Token, not Basic), nor does it support JWT with a shared secret. Please raise an issue if this is desired. Not required, default is no authentication.
  • max-request-elapsed-time: the maximum amount of time to retry before giving up and dropping data, defaults to 15s
  • max-requests: the maximum number of parallel requests. This is primarily network I/O, with very little CPU, it should be capped if it is overwhelming the influxdb server. Defaults to 10 times the number of logical cores.
  • metrics-per-batch: the number of metrics to send per request. InfluxDB recommends 5-10k for 1.x and 5k for 2.x. Defaults to 5000.
  • transport: the HTTP transport to use, see TRANSPORT.md for further information.
Example configuration
[influxdb]
api-endpoint='https://influxdb.local/'
compress-payload=true
credentials='metrics:metrics'
max-request-elapsed-time='15s'
max-requests=20
metrics-per-batch=7500
transport='default'

Version 1 specific

  • consistency: the consistency to send in an enterprise deployment. Should be any, one, quorum, all, or unset. Any other value will show a warning on startup but still use the provided value. Defaults to unset.
  • database: the database to send to. Required, no default.
  • retention-policy: the retention policy in the database to use. Not required, default is unset.
Example
[influxdb]
... common settings ...

api-version=1
consistency='any'
database='mydatabase'
retention-policy='myrp'

Version 2 specific

  • bucket: the bucket to send to. Required, no default.
  • org: the org to send to. Required, no default.
Example
[influxdb]
... common settings ...

api-version=2
bucket='mydatabase/myrp'
org=''

Using v1 settings in v2 or v2 settings in v1 will display a warning on startup and ignore the setting.

Tag normalization

As the dogstatsd protocol doesn't have exact parity with InfluxDBs line protocol, there is some cleanup applied to the tags before sending them. Specifically:

  • tags with only a value are normalized as unnamed:value
  • multiple values for duplicate keys are sorted
  • keys with multiple values have their values concatenated with __

For example, given the tags foo, key:bar, unnamed:baz, key:thing, other:something, the result will be normalized as key=bar__thing,other=something,unnamed=baz__foo. Tags are also sorted, in accordance with best practices for efficient ingestion.

Events

Events are sent as a measurement named events. The tags on the datapoint will be:

  • all the tags on the event, excluding the special tag eventtags which is ignored
  • host will be either the source IP address of the event or, if present, the host tag
  • priority will be set to one of info, warning, error, or success depending on the priority of the event
  • alerttype will be set to normal or low depending on the alert type of the event
  • sourcetypename will be the source type of the event if present, otherwise there is no sourcetype tag

The fields on the datapoint will be:

  • title is the title of the event
  • text is the text of the event
  • tags (specifically a field named tags) will be the comma joined list of all tags named evettags in the source event.

Note: the decisions around tag normalization and events are biased towards querying from Grafana, and were made by a non-expert in InfluxDB. As such, they made not match best practices. Please raise an issue if there are concerns, including recommendations on how they should be processed and formatted.

Metrics

Metric names are always what is sent, with the field values carrying the data. The field names used by each metric type are as follows:

  • counter: count, rate
  • gauge: value
  • set: count
  • timer (regular): lower, upper, count, rate, mean, median, stddev, sum, sum_squares, count_XX, mean_XX, sum_XX, sum_squares_XX, upper_XX, lower_XX. These can be configured through the disabled-sub-metrics setting.
  • timer (histogram): le.+Inf, le.XX

All metric field values are floats, even when they could be integers (such as counts).

New Relic Backend

Supports three flush-types for sending metrics to New Relic:

  • infra Via the Infrastructure Agent's inbuilt HTTP Server (default)
  • insights Directly to the Insights Collector - Insights Event API
  • metrics Directly to the Metric API - Metric Event API

An attempt will be made to automatically set the flush-type based on the address you have configured, manual configuration is also available.

New Relic Insights Event API

Sending directly to the Event API alleviates the requirement of needing to have the New Relic Infrastructure Agent. Therefore you can run this from nearly anywhere for maximum flexibility. This also becomes a shorter data path with less resource requirements becoming a simpler setup.

To use this method, create an Insert API Key from here: https://insights.newrelic.com/accounts/YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID/manage/api_keys. More information on registering an Insert API Key can be found here.

#Example Insights Collector configuration

[newrelic]
    transport = "default"
    address = "https://insights-collector.newrelic.com/v1/accounts/YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID/events"
    api-key = "yourEventAPIInsertKey"

See TRANSPORT.md for information about transport.

Make sure that address is set to https://insights-collector.eu01.nr-data.net/v1/accounts/YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID/events if your account hosts data in the EU data center.

New Relic's Metric API

To enable sending metrics to the Metric API endpoint you need to set the config setting address-metrics to https://metric-api.newrelic.com/metric/v1. These events appear in New Relic Insights as a new event type. These new events can then be used to leverage the power of NRQL for querying the metric data.

To use this method, create an Insert API Key from here: https://insights.newrelic.com/accounts/YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID/manage/api_keys

#Example Metric API configuration

[newrelic]
    transport = "default"
    address-metrics = "https://metric-api.newrelic.com/metric/v1"
    api-key = "yourEventAPIInsertKey"

Make sure that address-metrics is set to https://metric-api.eu.newrelic.com/metric/v1 if your account hosts data in the EU data center.

It is also recommended to set up the backend to either use the Insight Collector or the Infrastructure Agent to send none metric events back to New Relic.

#Example Metric API configuration with Insights Collector support

[newrelic]
    transport = "default"
    address = "https://insights-collector.newrelic.com/v1/accounts/YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID/events"
    address-metrics = "https://metric-api.newrelic.com/metric/v1"
    api-key = "yourEventAPIInsertKey"

New Relic Infrastructure Agent

Sending via the Infrastructure Agent's inbuilt HTTP server provides additional features, such as automatically applying additional metadata to the event the host may have such as AWS tags, instance type, host information, labels etc.

The payload structure required to be accepted by the agent can be viewed here.

To enable the HTTP server, modify /etc/newrelic.yml to include the below, and restart the agent (Step 1.2).

http_server_enabled: true
http_server_host: 127.0.0.1 #(default host)
http_server_port: 8001 #(default port)

Manual Flush Type Configuration

The flush-type attribute can be configured with the following available options - insights, metrics or infra.

[newrelic]
    transport = "default"
	flush-type = "insights" # <--
    address = "https://another-collector.newrelic.com/v1/accounts/YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID/events"
    api-key = "yourEventAPIInsertKey"

Renaming Attributes

This option is only available for insights and infra flush-types.

Additional options are available to rename attributes if required.

[newrelic]
	tag-prefix = ""
	metric-name = "name"
	metric-type = "type"
	per-second = "per_second"
	value = "value"
	timer-min = "min"
	timer-max = "max"
	timer-count = "samples_count"
	timer-mean = "samples_mean"
	timer-median = "samples_median"
	timer-stddev = "samples_std_dev"
	timer-sum = "samples_sum"
	timer-sumsquare = "samples_sum_squares"

Host Tag

When --ignore-host is not set, the New Relic backend will add the tag statsdSource to all metrics. The value of this tag will be the gostatsd.Source string recorded with each metric. So as not to collide with the existing host attribute that is added to many infrastructure samples, the name statsdSource was chosen instead of host.

NOTE: The addition of the statsdSource tag can potentially cause an explosion in cardinality. To avoid hitting cardinality limits, the --ignore-host option is the default when using the New Relic backend. To enable this functionality, supply --ignore-host false and be sure to watch your cardinality closely with a query like SELECT cardinality() FROM Metric WHERE integration.name='GoStatsD' or SELECT cardinality() FROM Metric WHERE integration.name='GoStatsD' FACET metricName.