libhoney-rust

Rust library for sending data to Honeycomb.

I'd be forever greatful if you can try it out and provide feedback. There are a few reasons why I think this may not yet be ready for production use:

• Honeycomb uses the singleton pattern for the libraries but I decided not to use it here (mostly due to: harder to get right, it feels to me like a rust anti-pattern). If you think I should have, please let me know.

• I'm not convinced of the threading code. Although "it works" it probably isn't great - any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

For these reasons, you're probably better waiting for a 1.0.0 release (I'll follow semantic versioning). Having said that, if you still want to use this, thank you for being brave, and make sure to open bugs against it!

libhoney

Rust library for sending events to Honeycomb, a service for debugging your software in production.

• Usage and Examples
• API Reference

Usage and Examples

Initialization

Initialize the library by passing in your Team API key and the default dataset name to which it should send events. When you call the library’s initialization routine, it spins up background threads to handle sending all the events. Calling .close() on the client will terminate all background threads.

let client = libhoney::init(libhoney::Config{
  options: libhoney::client::Options {
    api_key: "YOUR_API_KEY".to_string(),
    dataset: "honeycomb-rust-example".to_string(),
    ..libhoney::client::Options::default()
  },
  transmission_options: libhoney::transmission::Options::default(),
});

client.close();

Further configuration options can be found in the API reference.

Building and Sending Events

Once initialized, the libhoney client is ready to send events. Events go through three phases:

• Creation event := builder.new_event()
• Adding fields event.add_field("key", Value::String("val".to_string())), event.add(data)
• Transmission event.send(&mut client)

Upon calling .send(), the event is dispatched to be sent to Honeycomb. All libraries set defaults that will allow your application to function as smoothly as possible during error conditions.

In its simplest form, you can add a single attribute to an event with the .add_field(k, v) method. If you add the same key multiple times, only the last value added will be kept.

More complex structures (maps and structs—things that can be serialized into a JSON object) can be added to an event with the .add(data) method.

Events can have metadata associated with them that is not sent to Honeycomb. This metadata is used to identify the event when processing the response. More detail about metadata is below in the Response section.

Handling responses

Sending an event is an asynchronous action and will avoid blocking by default. .send() will enqueue the event to be sent as soon as possible (thus, the return value doesn’t indicate that the event was successfully sent). Use the Vec returned by .responses() to check whether events were successfully received by Honeycomb’s servers.

Before sending an event, you have the option to attach metadata to that event. This metadata is not sent to Honeycomb; instead, it’s used to help you match up individual responses with sent events. When sending an event, libhoney will take the metadata from the event and attach it to the response object for you to consume. Add metadata by populating the .metadata attribute directly on an event.

Responses have a number of fields describing the result of an attempted event send:

• metadata: the metadata you attached to the event to which this response corresponds

• status_code: the HTTP status code returned by Honeycomb when trying to send the event. 2xx indicates success.

• duration: the time.Duration it took to send the event.

• body: the body of the HTTP response from Honeycomb. On failures, this body contains some more information about the failure.

• error: when the event doesn’t even get to create a HTTP attempt, the reason will be in this field. (e.g. when sampled or dropped because of a queue overflow).

You don’t have to process responses if you’re not interested in them—simply ignoring them is perfectly safe. Unread responses will be dropped.

Examples

Honeycomb can calculate all sorts of statistics, so send the data you care about and let us crunch the averages, percentiles, lower/upper bounds, cardinality—whatever you want—for you.

Simple: send an event

use libhoney::FieldHolder; // Add trait to allow for adding fields
// Call init to get a client
let mut client = init(libhoney::Config {
  options: options,
  transmission_options: libhoney::transmission::Options::default(),
});

let mut data: HashMap<String, Value> = HashMap::new();
data.insert("duration_ms".to_string(), json!(153.12));
data.insert("method".to_string(), Value::String("get".to_string()));
data.insert("hostname".to_string(), Value::String("appserver15".to_string()));
data.insert("payload_length".to_string(), json!(27));

let mut ev = client.new_event();
ev.add(data);
 // In production code, please check return of `.send()`
ev.send(&mut client).err();