restores compatibility with vanilla statsd
 references:
  statsd documentation – https://github.com/etsy/statsd/blob/master/docs/metric_types.md
  breakage from commit dcae  – https://github.com/indeedeng/java-dogstatsd-client/commit/dcaed45c36ef74ba370d806647a4a06b173a9566#commitcomment-5832637