Extending timers - could some more methods in MetricRegistry be made protected?

[Niels Ull Harremoës]

Hi!

I would like to extend the timers and meters to be able to report the time (java.util.Date()) of the latest event.

So I extended MetricRegistry,overriding timer(name) and meter(name)  

It seems unnecessarily complicated due to MetricRegistry.getOrAdd and MetricBuilder being private?

If these were protected instead, I would have copy/pasted a lot less code.

Regards, Niels