Consider a PR for .current similar to Redis

[harlow]

We have a number of tags that we instantiate Statsd with. With Redis.current we do something similar:

# config/initializers/redis.rb
config = {
  # ...
}
Redis.current = Redis.new(config)

https://github.com/redis/redis-rb/blob/b9ac235fa03de173d1d382878757850afae94bc3/lib/redis.rb#L19-L25

Would DataDog team consider a PR that does same for Statsd?

# config/initializers/redis.rb
tags: {
  # env, service name, revision, etc
}
Statsd.current = Statsd.new(url, port, tags)

[yannmh]

Thank @harlow

Could you give us more details about the use cases please ? I am not sure to understand how it would help you.

-- Yann

[harlow]

hi @yannmh we use Statsd throughout our codebase so it would be nice to be able to reference an initialized version of it.

# config/initializers/statsd.rb
tags: {
  # env, service name, revision, etc
}
Statsd.current = Statsd.new(url, port, tags)

# app/models/foo.rb
class Foo
  def bar
    if some_success_case?
      statsd.increment('xyz')
    end
  end

  private

  def statsd
    Statsd.current
  end
end

This was we have access to the configured Statsd.new that was initialized in config.

[yannmh]

Seems like a nice feature, thanks for the further explanations @harlow !
We'll certainly consider it for an upcoming release.

[sj26]

@harlow the easiest way we've found to do this is set a global variable for use across your application:

# config/initializers/statsd.rb
$statsd = Datadog::Statsd.new(...)

# app/models/foo.rb
class Foo
  def bar
    if some_success_case?
      $statsd.increment('xyz')
    end
  end
end

[aharpervc]

Is using a global variable compatible with the v5 requirement of needing to call close? Or, put another way, how could you do the global variable approach in v5?

I'm trying to upgrade an app that used a similar pattern, but I want to use buffer_flush_interval and not send stats live for each invocation of increment (etc).

Thoughts?

[ivoanjo]

You could perhaps use Kernel#at_exit to ask Ruby to call it automatically on shutdown, although there may be a better way depending on your application.

[aharpervc]

You could perhaps use Kernel#at_exit to ask Ruby to call it automatically on shutdown, although there may be a better way depending on your application.

Yep, that's more or less what I figured out over here (then ran into a different issue): #265 (comment)

[ivoanjo]

Ah, I totally missed the other ticket 😰