dipstick
dipstick 
A one-stop shop metrics library for Rust applications with lots of features,
minimal impact on applications and a choice of output to downstream systems.
Features
Dipstick is a toolkit to help all sorts of application collect and send out metrics. As such, it needs a bit of set up to suit one’s needs. Skimming through the handbook and many examples should help you get an idea of the possible configurations.
In short, dipstick-enabled apps can:
- Send metrics to console, log, statsd, graphite or prometheus (one or many)
- Locally aggregate the count, sum, mean, min, max and rate of metric values
- Publish aggregated metrics, on schedule or programmatically
- Customize output statistics and formatting
- Define global or scoped (e.g. per request) metrics
- Statistically sample metrics (statsd)
- Choose between sync or async operation
- Choose between buffered or immediate output
- Switch between metric backends at runtime
For convenience, dipstick builds on stable Rust with minimal, feature-gated dependencies. Performance, safety and ergonomy are also prime concerns.
Non-goals
Dipstick’s focus is on metrics collection (input) and forwarding (output). Although it will happily aggregate base statistics, for the sake of simplicity and performance Dipstick will not
- plot graphs
- send alerts
- track histograms
These are all best done by downstream timeseries visualization and monitoring tools.
Show me the code!
Here’s a basic aggregating & auto-publish counter metric:
use dipstick::*;
fn main() {
let bucket = AtomicBucket::new();
bucket.drain(Stream::write_to_stdout());
bucket.flush_every(std::time::Duration::from_secs(3));
let counter = bucket.counter("counter_a");
counter.count(8);
}
Persistent apps wanting to declare static metrics will prefer using the metrics! macro:
use dipstick::*;
metrics! { METRICS = "my_app" => {
pub COUNTER: Counter = "my_counter";
}
}
fn main() {
METRICS.target(Graphite::send_to("localhost:2003").expect("connected").metrics());
COUNTER.count(32);
}
For sample applications see the examples. For documentation see the handbook.
To use Dipstick in your project, add the following line to your Cargo.toml
in the [dependencies] section:
dipstick = "0.9.0"
External features
Configuring dipstick from a text file is possible using the spirit-dipstick crate.
Building
When building the crate prior to PR or release, just run plain old make.
This will in turn run cargo a few times to run tests, benchmarks, lints, etc.
Unfortunately, nightly Rust is still required to run bench and clippy.
TODO / Missing / Weak points
- Prometheus support is still primitive (read untested). Only the push gateway approach is supported for now.
- No backend for “pull” metrics yet. Should at least provide tiny-http listener capability.
- No quick integration feature with common frameworks (Actix, etc.) is provided yet.
- Thread Local buckets could be nice.
- “Rolling” aggregators would be nice for pull metrics. Current bucket impl resets after flush.
License
Dipstick is licensed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 and MIT license.