Graphing unleashed. Can statsd be trusted?

Real-time statistics is a big yes. We write web-apps and knowing the delay caused by on the fly image resize will impact usability or not is important. We started exploring statsd for this purpose. To know what works well in the application and what does not. An automatic referendum of sorts where users by pointing there browsers cast their vote about good, bad and ugly parts. Statsd works well, I feel, in a trusted environment. Where developer using statsd to log counter is sitting next to admin managing graphite. But what happens when developer is not trusted, statsd fails miserably. It has does not enough validations on received data. So many things can go wrong. At best developer is not able to log, at worse, he crashes the whole statsd server. What are the alternatives in such a situation? Hacker news readers, please help.