DataDog custom metrics not showing up graph using ROR

Question

We are trying to integrate DataDog with our Ruby On Rails app. Our ROR app will continuously add users, update users and delete users every second.

I have integrated Datadog to monitor the no. of users added, updated and deleted through the graph provided by Datadog.

I installed the datadog agent using the command for Ubuntu Aws instance.

I got a free trial for 14 days.

I followed this document for dogstatd-ruby gem : https://github.com/DataDog/dogstatsd-ruby

After that i wrote the code in my ruby project like below :

require 'statsd'

dogstatsd = Statsd.new('MY_API_KEY')

user_data = ExportUser.find_by_userID(user["userId"].to_s)

if user_data.nil?
   dogstatsd.increment('custom.users.added')  #increment dogstat if a user is added and below query is run

   #new record, go ahead with insertion
   user_new = ExportUser.new(user)
   @status = user_new.save

else
   dogstatsd.increment('custom.users.updated') #increment dogstat if a user is updated and below query is run

   #existing record, go ahead with updation
   @status = user_data.update_attributes(user)
end

Here i dont see "custom.users.updated" and "custom.users.added" graph in the metrics explorer.

I would really appreciate if any1 help me out to set the graph for these 2 metrics in Datadog account. please let me know if i missed anything here.

Answer 1

Just a few items to note to get this working:

dogstatsd = Statsd.new('MY_API_KEY')

This line of code is trying to use your API key to establish a statsD connection, but this should actually be trying to establish the statsD connection via the statsD port currently configured on your Agent as seen here:

Create a stats instance. statsd = Statsd.new('localhost', 8125)

The easiest way to get your custom metrics into Datadog is to send them to DogStatsD, a metrics aggregation server bundled with the Datadog Agent (in versions 3.0 and above). DogStatsD implements the StatsD protocol, along with a few extensions for special Datadog features.

http://docs.datadoghq.com/guides/dogstatsd/

If you would not like to deploy an Agent on the host running the RoR application, you can utilize DogAPI gem:

https://github.com/DataDog/dogapi-rb

Which has additional documentation to get this custom metrics submitted:

require 'rubygems'
require 'dogapi'

api_key = "abcdef123456"

dog = Dogapi::Client.new(api_key)

dog.emit_point('some.metric.name', 50.0, :host => "my_host", :device => "my_device")

If you have additional questions, please reach out to [email protected]