Quickstart

One app entry and two middlewares. The order is the only fiddly part: the tracker goes at the top of the stack and the timer at the bottom, so that between them they wrap everything else you run.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django_statsd',
]

MIDDLEWARE = [
    'django_statsd.middleware.StatsdMiddleware',
    'django_statsd.middleware.StatsdMiddlewareTimer',
]

STATSD_HOST = '127.0.0.1'
STATSD_PORT = 8125
STATSD_PREFIX = 'myproject'
STATSD_TRACK_MIDDLEWARE = True

Your own middlewares go between those two entries.

STATSD_TRACK_MIDDLEWARE defaults to False, so the middlewares install and stay quiet until you set it. That lets the configuration change land in one deploy and the metrics in the next.

The first request

One GET /dashboard/ against that configuration puts this on the wire:

# GET /dashboard/

myproject.view.get.myproject.views.dashboard.hit
myproject.view.get.myproject.views.dashboard.process_request
myproject.view.get.myproject.views.dashboard.process_response
myproject.view.get.myproject.views.dashboard.process_view
myproject.view.get.myproject.views.dashboard.total
myproject.view.http_codes.2xx
myproject.view.http_codes.hit
myproject.view.site.hit

Eight metrics from one request, and the shape repeats for every view you have. myproject is your STATSD_PREFIX and view is the middleware’s own prefix. Then comes the HTTP method and the dotted path of the view function, so dashboard here is myproject.views.dashboard.

Under that name, total is the whole request and process_request, process_view and process_response are the three phases inside it. hit is a counter. That is how you get a request rate per view without dividing anything.

The last two are project-wide: view.site.hit counts every request that django-statsd saw, and view.http_codes.2xx counts this response’s status class.

Measure your views takes those apart properly. If you want the full list of names first, it’s in Metric reference.