Datadog Python library doesn't seem to like Unicode.

datadog_ascii.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from __future__ import (absolute_import, division, print_function,
                        unicode_literals)

from datadog import statsd


def main():
    """docstring for main"""
    print('ASCII Tags')
    ascii_tags = {
        'person': 'John',
        'place': 'Mars',
        'thing': 'burrito'
    }
    formatted_tags = format_tags(ascii_tags)
    statsd.increment('tagged_counter', 1, tags=formatted_tags)

    print('Unicode Tags')
    unicode_tags = {
        'person': 'Jóhn',
        'place': 'Хельсинки',
        'thing': 'burrito'
    }
    formatted_tags = format_tags(unicode_tags)
    statsd.increment('tagged_counter', 1, tags=formatted_tags)


def format_tags(tags):
    """
    Format tag data for Datadog.

    :param dict tags: key-value pairs of tag data to include with metric
    :return: Tags formatted for Datadog.
    :rtype: list
    """
    dd_tags = []
    map(dd_tags.append, ('{}:{}'.format(tag, val) for tag, val in tags.iteritems()))
    return dd_tags


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

output.sh

# python datadog_ascii.py
ASCII Tags
Unicode Tags
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "datadog_ascii.py", line 44, in <module>
    main()
  File "datadog_ascii.py", line 26, in main
    formatted_tags = format_tags(unicode_tags)
  File "datadog_ascii.py", line 39, in format_tags
    map(dd_tags.append, (b'{}:{}'.format(tag, val) for tag, val in tags.iteritems()))
  File "datadog_ascii.py", line 39, in <genexpr>
    map(dd_tags.append, (b'{}:{}'.format(tag, val) for tag, val in tags.iteritems()))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf3' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)