> Not available on all platforms. Think: mainframes, platforms no longer with the times, non-unix and so on.
YMMV, though I would steer people towards an off-the-shelf solution over rolling your own.
Does "non-unix" mean Windows? My experience there has been that you can find a statsd client for your language of choice, and a way to plug whatever logging tool you have into kibana.
Quite often there is an embedded component in the mix somewhere, or even a machine that is not networked in any present day sense of the word.
The whole reason these jobs exist is because modern tooling and the luxury that comes with them is unavailable. But I've yet to find a platform where that counter trick did not work, even on embedded platforms you can usually get away with a couple of incs and a way to read out the counters.
If the timing isn't too close to failure.
One interesting case involved a complex real life multi-player game with wearable computers. In the end we got it to work but only by making all the software run twice as fast as it did before so we could use the odd cycles for the stats collection without the rest of the system noticing. That was a big of a hack. And the best bit: after making it work we then used all the freed up time to send extra packets to give the system some redundancy and this greatly improved reliability.
That system was running 8051 micro controllers and the guy that wrote the original said that 'this couldn't be done'. Fun times :)
The server side portion of that particular project got completely re-written as well roughly along the lines presented in the article, that wasn't a huge project (500K lines or so) but I was very happy that it wasn't my first large technical debt mitigation project or I would have likely stranded.
YMMV, though I would steer people towards an off-the-shelf solution over rolling your own.
Does "non-unix" mean Windows? My experience there has been that you can find a statsd client for your language of choice, and a way to plug whatever logging tool you have into kibana.