Why use statsd when graphite's Carbon aggregator can do the same job?

Question

I have been exploring the Graphite graphing tool for showing metrics from multiple servers, and it seems that the \'recommended\' way is to send all metrics data to StatsD first

Answer 1

Because graphite has a minimum resolution, so you cannot save two different values for the same metric during defined interval. StatsD solves this problem by pre-aggregating them, and instead of saying "1 user registered now" and "1 user registered now" it says "2 users registered".

The other reason is performance because:

1. You send data to StatsD via UDP, which is a fire and forget protocol, stateless, much faster
2. StatsD etsy's implementation is in NodeJS which also increases the performance a lot.