Send StatsD metrics to Axiom

StatsD is a simple push-based protocol for app metrics like counters, gauges, and timers. Axiom doesn’t provide a native StatsD listener. Instead, you send StatsD metrics to Axiom with the StatsD receiver of the OpenTelemetry Collector. The receiver listens for StatsD packets, aggregates them, and forwards the results to Axiom as OpenTelemetry metrics.

Prerequisites

• Create an Axiom account.
• Create a dataset in Axiom where you send your data.
• Create an API token in Axiom with permissions to ingest data to the dataset you have created.

Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector

Add the StatsD receiver and an OTLP/HTTP exporter that sends data to Axiom:

receivers:
  statsd:
    endpoint: 0.0.0.0:8125    # UDP by default. Defaults to localhost:8125 if omitted.
    aggregation_interval: 60s # How often aggregated metrics are flushed to the exporter.

processors:
  batch:
    send_batch_max_size: 8192

exporters:
  otlphttp:
    compression: zstd
    endpoint: https://AXIOM_DOMAIN
    headers:
      authorization: Bearer API_TOKEN
      x-axiom-metrics-dataset: DATASET_NAME

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers:
        - statsd
      processors:
        - batch
      exporters:
        - otlphttp

Point your StatsD clients at the collector’s address and port (UDP 8125 in the example above) instead of your previous StatsD server.

Send a test metric

With the collector running, send a test counter using netcat:

echo -n "test.requests:1|c" | nc -u -w1 localhost 8125

After the next aggregation interval, the test.requests metric appears in your Metrics dataset in Axiom.

Metric types

The StatsD receiver maps StatsD metric types to OpenTelemetry metric types:

Axiom supports all of these resulting types. For the full list of supported OTel metric types and current limitations, see Supported data types.

Query your metrics

Once data is flowing, query your StatsD metrics like any other OTel metrics in Axiom. For more information, see Metrics.