Graphite is a popular realtime graphing package I’ve used a bunch at Patch and at Newco. A popular way to roll data up to it is by using a statsd server (ex:etsy/statsd from etsy) which packages up multiple statistics requests and sends them to graphite in batches (at a default flush interval of 10s).

This morning, having a need for a statsd-client in PHP - I put one together and released it as a spark. Check it out if you’re interested in statsd/graphite in PHP, but more importantly if you have similarly small libraries you’ve written, don’t be afraid to release them because they’re too small . Anything someone else doesn’t have to write will be useful, as long as its abstracted enough away from your application.

Using php-statsd is easy - I’ll focus on using it with CodeIgniter (but it can be used without, see the README)

<?php
$this->load->spark('statsd');

// Count a use of the browse page over time
$this->statsd->counting('browse_page');

// Record the load time of something (milliseconds)
$this->statsd->timing('load', 123);

// Record the load time of a anonymous function
$this->statsd->time_this('something', function() {
  sleep(1);
});