Proposal: attributes as metrics & extra metrics
Karina Ciupa
Hi all,
I am reaching out with a proposal for two different extensions of your project.
In the company that I work for, we needed to extend your project in order to collect additional data from non-standard mbeans. I am opening this discussion to check if you would be interested in merging these extensions in your project.
1. Exposing string-type mbean attributes as labels.
The mbeans that we are working with have a lot of string-type attributes which are not converted into metrics by your project.
However, we need to expose the information offered by these string attributes to Prometheus, such that they can be used in queries, or be displayed in graphs.
The best way to do this (that we were able to find) is to expose these attributes as labels on the other metrics. We made this behavior configurable in the rules section of the yaml configuration file. Here is an example:
rules:
- pattern: '{some mbean pattern}'
name: some_metric
attributesAsLabels:
- firstStringAttribute
- secondStringAttribute
This produces a metric that looks like this:
some_metric_attribute{firstStringAttribute="something",secondStringAttribute="something else"} 123
2. Adding additional metrics to an mbean.
Some of the mbeans that we are working with do not expose any useful metrics, so we implemented a way to define a custom metric through the configuration file. This is also configurable in the rules section of the yaml configuration file. Here is an example:
- pattern: '{some mbean pattern}'
name: some_metric
extraMetrics:
- name: someName
value: someValue
description: someDescription
This produces a metric that looks like this:
some_metric_someName{...} someValue
The description is used in the "HELP" section of the logs and indicates what purpose the metric serves.
Please let me know if you are interested in these features. If you are, I will open separate pull requests.
Also, please tell me if there is any way to achieve this behavior in another way that is already available in your project.
Kind regards,
Karina Ciupa
karina...@infobest.ro
