Collect Kong Gateway metrics with the StatsD plugin

Uses: Kong Gateway decK

Deployment Platform:

Prerequisites

Kong Konnect

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

Create a new personal access token by opening the Konnect PAT page and selecting Generate Token.
Export your token to an environment variable:
```
 export KONNECT_TOKEN='YOUR_KONNECT_PAT'
```
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 $KONNECT_TOKEN --deck-output
```
This sets up a Konnect Control Plane named quickstart, provisions a local Data Plane, and prints out the following environment variable exports:
```
 export DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN=$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'
```
Copy and paste these into your terminal to configure your session.

Kong Gateway running

This tutorial requires Kong Gateway Enterprise. If you don’t have Kong Gateway set up yet, you can use the quickstart script with an enterprise license to get an instance of Kong Gateway running almost instantly.

Export your license to an environment variable:

 export KONG_LICENSE_DATA='LICENSE-CONTENTS-GO-HERE'

Run the quickstart script:

 curl -Ls https://get.konghq.com/quickstart | bash -s -- -e KONG_LICENSE_DATA 

Once Kong Gateway is ready, you will see the following message:

 Kong Gateway Ready

decK

decK is a CLI tool for managing Kong Gateway declaratively with state files. To complete this tutorial you will first need to install decK.

Required entities

For this tutorial, you’ll need Kong Gateway entities, like Gateway Services and Routes, pre-configured. These entities are essential for Kong Gateway to function but installing them isn’t the focus of this guide. Follow these steps to pre-configure them:

Run the following command:

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
services:
  - name: example-service
    url: http://httpbin.konghq.com/anything
routes:
  - name: example-route
    paths:
    - "/anything"
    service:
      name: example-service
' | deck gateway apply -

To learn more about entities, you can read our entities documentation.

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

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 -

Validate

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

curl -i "$KONNECT_PROXY_URL/anything"

curl -i "http://localhost:8000/anything"

Run this command to check the metrics collected with StatsD:

echo "counters" | nc localhost 8126

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

StatsD

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

Destroy the Kong Gateway container

curl -Ls https://get.konghq.com/quickstart | bash -s -- -d

Clean up Konnect environment

If you created a new control plane and want to conserve your free trial credits or avoid unnecessary charges, delete the new control plane used in this tutorial.

Next Steps

Review the StatsD plugin configuration reference