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).

Supported OneAgent

StatsD daemon is only available on OneAgent installed on the VM or host that you want to monitor. OneAgent deployed on Kubernetes, for example using Dynatrace Operator, isn't supported. For Kubernetes environments, we recommend remote StatsD monitoring using an ActiveGate.

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.

Choose your StatsD ingestion method

Use OneAgent for direct installation on the host with StatsD. For more details, go to OneAgent listener.

If OneAgent cannot be installed on the host, use ActiveGate as a remote listener to collect StatsD metrics. For more details, go to Remote StatsD.

For distributed environments or when using Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry Collector provides a solution to ingest StatsD metrics into Dynatrace. For more details, see Ingest data from StatsD.

Enable DynatraceStatsD

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

To enable DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion at the environment level

Go to Settings and select Preferences > Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Dynatrace StatsD.

To enable DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion at the host group level

Go to Settings and select Monitoring overview > Hosts.
Select the host group name for a chosen host.
On the Host group settings page, select Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Dynatrace StatsD.

To enable DynatraceStatsD metric ingestion only for selected hosts

Go to Hosts or Hosts Classic (latest Dynatrace).
Find and select your host to display the host overview page.
In the upper-right corner of the host overview page, select More (…) > Settings.

In the host settings, select Extension Execution Controller.
Turn on Enable Extension Execution Controller.

Turn on Enable Dynatrace 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:
```
statsdenabled=true
```
Restart the Extension Execution Controller service.
- Linux Run the following commands:
  - for systems with SystemV:
    service extensionsmodule stop
    service extensionsmodule start
  - for systems with systemd:
    systemctl stop extensionsmodule
    systemctl start extensionsmodule
- Windows Use Task Manager and restart the Dynatrace Extensions Controller service or run the following commands:
```
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:

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
```
<metric name>:<value>|c
```
gauge
```
<metric name>:<value>|g
```
time
```
<metric name>:<value>|ms
```
histogram
```
<metric name>:<value>|h
```
set OneAgent version 1.303+
```
<metric name>:<value>|s
```
distribution
```
<metric name>:<value>|d
```

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

<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

StatsD on ActiveGate

345,000

13,800