As somebody who focuses on the systems side of IT, I have a strong affinity to monitoring. One of my favorite quotes comes from Theo Schlossnagle (@postwait, OmniTI) during an InfoQ panel on Infrastructre as Code. About 27 minutes into the discussion, Theo says (to the best I can make out):
If it isn’t monitored, it is by definition not production.
IMO, one of the best things I’ve seen come to monitoring is StatsD. Etsy blogged about the philosophy around it. The community has gotten behind it and made lots of StatsD servers and clients available. Monitoring companies like AppFirst and DataDog include it in their products. The one thing I needed and found missing: a PowerShell StatsD client.
As any good engineer would do, I wrote a PowerShell script to send data to a StatsD server, posted it on GitHub, and wrote a blog post about it. The script is unsigned so your PowerShell execution policy needs to be unrestricted in order to run it. Otherwise, it’s pretty simple. Download and run the script passing the data as described on Etsy’s StatsD GitHub page.
Enjoy.