README.md

beam_stats

Periodically collects and pushes VM metrics to arbitrary consumer processes, which, in-turn, can do whatever they want with the given data (such as serialize and forward to some time series storage). Includes, off by default, example implementations of consumers for:

• StatsD (beam_stats_consumer_statsd)
• Graphite (beam_stats_consumer_graphite)
• CSV file (beam_stats_consumer_csv)

Essentially like folsomite, but different. Different in the following ways:

• More-general: consumers other than graphite can be defined
• More-focused: only concerned with VM metrics, while folsomite ships off everything from folsom (in addition to VM metrics)
• Easier-(for me!)-to-reason-about implementation:
  • Well-defined metrics-to-binary conversions, as opposed to the nearly-arbitrary term-to-string conversions used in folsomite
  • Spec'd, tested and Dialyzed
• More detailed stats:
  • per-process. As much process ancestry is collected as possible, then anonymous processes are aggregated to their youngest-known, named predecessor - this aggregation keeps the useful breadcrumbs, while reducing the number of unique names from exploding, which avoids the associated problems:
    1. not very useful when there're lots of short-lived processes
    2. exploading disk space usage in Whisper
  • per-ETS-table
  • and more ... see records defined in include directory

For an example of using pre-process stats to track-down memory leaks, here's a screenshot of the SSL connection process memory usage growth drop after upgrade from 17.5 to 18.1 (back in 2015):

Adding consumers

At app config time

{env,
  [ {production_interval , 30000}
  , {consumers,
      [ {beam_stats_consumer_statsd,
          [ {consumption_interval , 60000}
          , {dst_host             , "localhost"}
          , {dst_port             , 8125}
          , {src_port             , 8124}
          , {num_msgs_per_packet  , 10}

          % If you want to name your node something other than what
          % erlang:node() returns:
          , {static_node_name     , <<"unicorn_at_rainbow">>}
          ]}
      , {beam_stats_consumer_graphite,
          [ {consumption_interval , 60000}
          , {host                 , "localhost"}
          , {port                 , 2003}
          , {timeout              , 5000}
          ]}
      , {beam_stats_consumer_csv,
          [ {consumption_interval , 60000}
          , {path                 , "beam_stats.csv"}
          ]}
      , {some_custom_consumer_module,
          [ {some_custom_option_a, "abc"}
          , {some_custom_option_b, 123}
          ]}

      ]}
  ]}

Dynamically

beam_stats_consumer:add(consumer_module, ConsumerOptions).

Removing consumers

Not yet implemented.