Ruby client library for SignalFx

This is a programmatic interface in Ruby for SignalFx's metadata and ingest APIs. It is meant to provide a base for communicating with SignalFx APIs that can be easily leveraged by scripts and applications to interact with SignalFx or report metric and event data to SignalFx. Library supports Ruby 2.x versions

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'signalfx'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install signalfx

Usage

API access token

To use this library, you need a SignalFx API access token, which can be obtained from the SignalFx organization you want to report data into.

Create client

The default constructor SignalFx uses Protobuf to send data to SignalFx. If it cannot send Protobuf, it falls back to sending JSON.

require('signalfx');

// Create client
client = SignalFx.new 'MY_SIGNALFX_TOKEN';

Optional constructor parameters:

api_token - Your private SignalFx token
enable_aws_unique_id - boolean, false by default. If true, library will retrieve Amazon unique identifier and set it as AWSUniqueId dimension for each datapoint and event. Use this option only if your application deployed to Amazon
ingest_endpoint - string
api_endpoint - string
timeout - number
batch_size - number
user_agents - array

Reporting data

This example shows how to report metrics to SignalFx, as gauges, counters, or cumulative counters.

require('signalfx');

client = SignalFx.new 'MY_SIGNALFX_TOKEN';

client.send(
           cumulative_counters:[
             {  :metric => 'myfunc.calls_cumulative', 
                :value => 10, 
                :timestamp => 1442960607000 },
             ...
           ],
           gauges:[
             {  :metric => 'myfunc.time', 
                :value => 532, 
                :timestamp => 1442960607000},
             ...
           ],
           counters:[
             {  :metric => 'myfunc.calls', 
                :value => 42, 
                :timestamp => 1442960607000},
             ...
           ]);

The timestamp must be a millisecond precision timestamp; the number of milliseconds elapsed since Epoch. The timestamp field is optional, but strongly recommended. If not specified, it will be set by SignalFx's ingest servers automatically; in this situation, the timestamp of your datapoints will not accurately represent the time of their measurement (network latency, batching, etc. will all impact when those datapoints actually make it to SignalFx).

Sending multi-dimensional data

Reporting dimensions for the data is also optional, and can be accomplished by specifying a dimensions parameter on each datapoint containing a dictionary of string to string key/value pairs representing the dimensions:

require('signalfx');

client = SignalFx.new 'MY_SIGNALFX_TOKEN';

client.send(
          cumulative_counters:[
            {   :metric => 'myfunc.calls_cumulative', 
                :value => 10, 
                :dimensions => [{:key => 'host', :value => 'server1'}]},
            ...
          ],
          gauges:[
            {   :metric => 'myfunc.time', 
                :value=> 532, 
                :dimensions=> [{:key => 'host', :value => 'server1'}]},
            ...
          ],
          counters:[
            {   :metric=> 'myfunc.calls', 
                :value=> 42, 
                :dimensions=> [{:key => 'host', :value => 'server1'}]},
            ...
          ]);

See examples/generic_usecase.py for a complete code example for Reporting data.

Sending events

Events can be sent to SignalFx via the send_event function. The event type must be specified, and dimensions and extra event properties can be supplied as well.

require('signalfx');

client = SignalFx.new 'MY_SIGNALFX_TOKEN';

client.send_event(
          '[event_type]',
          {
              host: 'myhost',
              service: 'myservice',
              instance: 'myinstance'
          },
          properties={
              version: 'event_version'})