I'm looking at adding StatsD data collection to my grails application and looking around at existing libraries and code has left me a little confused as to what would be a good scalable solution. To put the question into context a little I'm working on an online gaming type project where I will naturally be monitoring user interactions with the game engine, these will naturally cluster around particular moments in time where X users will be performing interactions within the window of a second or two, then repeating after a 10-20 second pause.

Here is my analysis of the options that are available today.

Etsy StatsD client example

https://github.com/etsy/statsd/blob/master/examples/StatsdClient.java

The "simplest thing that could possibly work" solution, I could pull this class into my project and instanciate a singleton instance as a spring bean and use it directly. However after noticing that the grails-statsd plugin creates a pool of client instances I started wondering about the scalability of this approach.

It seems that the doSend method could become a bottleneck if many threads are trying to send events at the same time, however as I understand it, due to the fire and forget nature of sending UDP packets, this should happen quickly, avoiding the huge overhead that we usually associate with network connections.

grails-statsd plugin

https://github.com/charliek/grails-statsd/

Someone has already created a StatsD plugin for grails that includes some nice features, such as the annotations and withTimer method. However I see that the implementation there is missing some bug fixes from the example implementation such as specifying the locale on calls to String.format. I'm also not a huge fan of pulling in apache