Send a metric to StatsD from bash

send_metric_to_statsd.sh

# Send a metric to statsd from bash
#
# Useful for:
#   deploy scripts (http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/)
#   init scripts
#   sending metrics via crontab one-liners
#   sprinkling in existing bash scripts.
#
# netcat options: 
#   -w timeout If a connection and stdin are idle for more than timeout seconds, then the connection is silently closed.  
#   -u         Use UDP instead of the default option of TCP.     
#
echo "deploys.test.myservice:1|c" | nc -w 1 -u graphite.example.com 8125

Awesome! :)

I sometimes found that nc -w 0 hung (couldn't understand out why), so started to pipe into socat as a drop-in replacement alternative:

echo "deploys.test.myservice:1|c" | socat -t 0 STDIN UDP:graphite.example.com:8125

very useful, thanks :)

Another suggestion:

echo "deploys.test.myservice:1|c" | nc -w 1 -cu graphite.example.com 8125

Note the -c, from nc --help:

  -c, --close                close connection on EOF from stdin

There is also https://docs.datadoghq.com/developers/dogstatsd/datagram_shell/?tab=metrics#send-metrics-and-events-using-dogstatsd-and-the-shell

Amazing, very simple and useful! :)