<Marc Qualie/>

StatsD PHP Library

Today, I just created a StatsD PHP Library and released it on Github . Before you start with "but there are already loads..", I do realise this, but they didn't suite my needs. This is a short post to let you know why I opted to create my own, and what I hope to achieve from it.

First of all, I was torn between two packages. The first one, domnikl/statsd-php, looked very feature-full, but felt way too complex to do such a simple task. For the ones of you that are familiar with StatsD, the concept is meant to be simple and efficient. I didn't quite like the idea of adding a huge library and bootstrap code to my projects just to send out metrics.

The second library, till/php-statsd is actually the one I am currently using, along with a few other friends and collegues. This is my library of choice due to it's simplicity in bootstrapping and efficiency. However, it didn't quite fit my needs on a bigger project and I'm not too fond of static only based programming. The main let-down of this library is the fact it can't support multiple servers within the same project (not without re-initialising before each call), so I simply can't use it for projects where I have multiple StatsD servers.

After evaluating these two options (and many others) I decided that creating my own would be the best option. I was heavily inspired by Till's implementation and took a lot of the same structure, but implemented it in a more object oriented fashion. I am still toying with the idea of making it backwards compatible, but chances are it'll be easier to just replace the old library and calls across my projects as I come to them. I also went with an optional factory-based initialisation system to allow sharing multiple instances with dependency injection.

I would love your feedback on what you think of this and if you chose to use it, how wel lit compares to other libraries you've used in the past.

Project Source: https://github.com/marcqualie/php-statsd

If you have any questions about this post, or anything else, you can get in touch on Twitter or browse my code on Github.