Hosted Graphite vs StatsD

Hosted Graphite vs StatsD: What are the differences?

Developers describe Hosted Graphite as "Graphite as a service". Hosted Graphite is the powerful open-source application metrics system used by hundreds of companies. We take away the headaches of scaling, maintenance, and upgrades and let you do what you do best - write great software. On the other hand, StatsD is detailed as "Simple daemon for easy stats aggregation". StatsD is a front-end proxy for the Graphite/Carbon metrics server, originally written by Etsy's Erik Kastner. StatsD is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Hosted Graphite and StatsD can be primarily classified as "Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Hosted Graphite are:

• Dashboards- Standard Graphite and Tasseo dashboards out of the box
• Account Sharing- Allow team members to customise graphs and dashboards
• Access Keys- Export data to external monitoring systems, dashboards and alerting systems

On the other hand, StatsD provides the following key features:

• buckets: Each stat is in its own "bucket". They are not predefined anywhere. Buckets can be named anything that will translate to Graphite (periods make folders, etc)
• values: Each stat will have a value. How it is interpreted depends on modifiers. In general values should be integer.
• flush: After the flush interval timeout (defined by config.flushInterval, default 10 seconds), stats are aggregated and sent to an upstream backend service.

"Great customer support" is the primary reason why developers consider Hosted Graphite over the competitors, whereas "Single responsibility" was stated as the key factor in picking StatsD.

StatsD is an open source tool with 14.2K GitHub stars and 1.83K GitHub forks. Here's a link to StatsD's open source repository on GitHub.