Thanks to Joshua Frederick (github user jfred), we now have an actual Python implementation of the statsd server, so if you don’t want to install node.js (though why wouldn’t you? :–) ) you can run it all in python.
from pystatsd import Client, Server
# client usage
sc = Client('example.org',8125)
sc.timing('python_test.time',500)
sc.increment('python_test.inc_int')
sc.decrement('python_test.decr_int')
# server usage
srvr = Server(pct_threshold=90,
graphite_port=2003, graphite_host='localhost')
srvr.serve()