signalfx

What it is and what it does

SignalFx is a Python client for the SignalFx monitoring platform, acquired by Splunk in 2019. It provides programmatic access to three main APIs: the data ingest API for sending metrics and events, the metadata REST API for managing tags and metric properties, and the SignalFlow API for real-time analytics. The library handles metric reporting with support for gauges, counters, and cumulative counters, optionally enriched with dimensions (key-value metadata). It queues datapoints internally and drains them via a background thread, allowing non-blocking metric submission from application code.

The package integrates with pyformance for CodaHale-style metrics and can automatically append AWS instance metadata as dimensions. It is designed as a base layer for scripts and applications that need to push observability data into SignalFx or for building metric reporters that bridge Python monitoring libraries to the platform. However, the library has been abandoned since November 2022 with no active maintenance, and the repository is archived.

Use it for:

• Send application metrics (latency, request counts, custom gauges) to SignalFx for real-time monitoring and alerting.
• Report deployment events and service state changes to SignalFx with contextual dimensions like host and service name.
• Integrate pyformance metrics collection into a SignalFx reporting pipeline for CodaHale-style instrumentation.
• Enrich metrics with AWS metadata (instance ID) automatically when running on EC2 instances.
• Query and update metric metadata and tags programmatically via the REST API.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Python client library for sending metrics, events, and metadata to SignalFx (now Splunk) via its ingest, REST, and SignalFlow APIs.

No, unless you are already locked into SignalFx and cannot migrate. The package is abandoned (last release November 2022, repository archived), with no active maintenance or support. Splunk has not published a recommended successor in this fact sheet. If you need to send metrics to Splunk or a modern observability platform, investigate current alternatives or Splunk's own SDKs before committing to this library.

Install

signalfx on PyPI

pip install signalfx

uv add signalfx

poetry add signalfx

Installing signalfx

Before you install

Low install friction with a pure-wheel distribution. However, the package is abandoned as of 2022-11-02 with no recent maintenance; the repository is archived. Use only if you are committed to maintaining a fork or have no alternative.

License in practice

Licensed under Apache Software License v2, a permissive license. You may use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial and private projects, provided you include a copy of the license and state significant changes.

Quickstart

pip install signalfx

import signalfx

sfx = signalfx.SignalFx().ingest('ORG_TOKEN')
sfx.send(gauges=[{'metric': 'myfunc.time', 'value': 532, 'timestamp': 1442960607000}])
sfx.stop()

Requires a valid SignalFx organization token and network access to SignalFx ingest endpoints. Timestamps must be in millisecond precision.

Verify before relying

• Whether the package works reliably with modern Python versions beyond 3.8 given its abandoned status.
• Whether Splunk maintains a successor or recommended replacement for this library.
• Compatibility of bundled dependencies (protobuf, requests, ws4py) with current versions.

Package facts

Evidence: signalfx-1.1.16-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Tags

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