JSON External Documentation Format is not Documented

[kylebrandt]

http://godoc.org/bosun.org/cmd/scollector doesn't talk about how they can output json now

[kylebrandt]

The PR that needs to be documented fced164

[gbrayut]

I'll add this to the resources PR today, but for now the structs used in JSON are opentsdb.DataPoint for metric data and metadata.Metasend for metadata. You send a stream of serialized JSON data over stdout, so when you run the program it should produce something like below. It starts with Metadata (only needed once, scollector will re-send as needed) and then starts sending metrics. You can also see the 4th line is a log message which was sent to stderror not stdout.

{"Metric":"exceptional.exceptions.count","Name":"rate","Value":"counter"}
{"Metric":"exceptional.exceptions.count","Name":"unit","Value":"errors"}
{"Metric":"exceptional.exceptions.count","Name":"desc","Value":"The number of exceptions thrown per second by applications and machines. Data is queried from multiple sources. See status instances for details on exceptions."}
2015/08/05 15:32:00 lookup OR-SQL03: no such host
{"metric":"exceptional.exceptions.count","timestamp":1438788720,"value":0,"tags":{"application":"AdServer","machine":"ny-web03","source":"NY_Status"}}
{"metric":"exceptional.exceptions.count","timestamp":1438788720,"value":2,"tags":{"application":"AdServer","machine":"ny-web04","source":"NY_Status"}}
{"metric":"exceptional.exceptions.count","timestamp":1438788720,"value":1,"tags":{"application":"AdServer","machine":"ny-web06","source":"NY_Status"}}

[gbrayut]

Update docs now at http://bosun.org/scollector/external-collectors