Collect Kong Gateway metrics with the StatsD plugin

Uses: Kong Gateway deck
Related Resources
Minimum Version
Kong Gateway - 3.4
TL;DR

Run a StatsD server and enable the StatsD plugin on your Kong Gateway.

Prerequisites

This is a Konnect tutorial and requires a Konnect personal access token.

  1. Create a new personal access token by opening the Konnect PAT page and selecting Generate Token.

  2. Export your token to an environment variable:

     export KONNECT_TOKEN='YOUR_KONNECT_PAT'
    
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  3. Run the quickstart script to automatically provision a Control Plane and Data Plane, and configure your environment:

     curl -Ls https://get.konghq.com/quickstart | bash -s -- -k $KONNECT_TOKEN --deck-output
    
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    This sets up a Konnect Control Plane named quickstart, provisions a local Data Plane, and prints out the following environment variable exports:

     export DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN=$KONNECT_TOKEN
     export DECK_KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_NAME=quickstart
     export KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL=https://us.api.konghq.com
     export KONNECT_PROXY_URL='http://localhost:8000'
    
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    Copy and paste these into your terminal to configure your session.

Start a StatsD server

Use the following command to run a StatsD container to capture monitoring data:

docker run -d --rm -p 8126:8126 \
  --name kong-quickstart-statsd --network=kong-quickstart-net \
  statsd/statsd:latest
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Enable the StatsD plugin

Configure the StatsD plugin with the hostname and port of the listening StatsD service. In this example, the listening host is the Docker container name, since it was started in the same network as the Kong Gateway quickstart, and the port is 8125:

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
plugins:
  - name: statsd
    config:
      host: kong-quickstart-statsd
      port: 8125
' | deck gateway apply -
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Validate

You can validate that the plugin is collecting metrics by generating traffic to the example Service:

 curl -i "$KONNECT_PROXY_URL/anything"
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Run this command to check the metrics collected with StatsD:

echo "counters" | nc localhost 8126
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In the response from StatsD, you should see a request count, the response code received, and a few other metrics. In this case, the request to the /anything path should have generated:

  'kong.service.example-service.request.count': 1,
  'kong.service.example-service.status.200': 1,
  ...

The StatsD server may take a few minutes to connect. If you’re not getting any metrics, wait a few minutes and try these validation steps again.

Cleanup

Once you are done experimenting with StatsD, you can use the following command to stop the StatsD server you created in this guide:

docker stop kong-quickstart-statsd
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